L'Etranger

In 1930 Camus suffered a serious attack of tuberculosis, an illness which eventually forced him to abandon his plans for an academic career. His first publications began to appear two years later in Sud, a minor literary magazine founded by one of his friends at the lycée d’Alger.6 It is tempting to see his literary preoccupations at this time in terms of his illness: tuberculosis was a revelation of the sudden possibility of death and a reminder that life, which he loved so much, was finite. However, Lottman tells us that Camus’s desire to write dates from when he was 7 years old,7 and Camus himself liked to stress the specifically literary origins of some of his early works, citing Gide,8Grenier,9and André de Richaud.10 Whatever one’s own view of this, by the time Camus published L’Enverset l’endroit in 1937, literary and personal experiences had combined to produce a body of thought which strives to demonstrate that love of life and lucid awareness of the finality of death are logically compatible attitudes to life. Death may well render life meaningless, but it also renders it precious.

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