Albert Camus is one of the best-known twentieth-century French authors. Born and raised in North Africa, after the beginning of World War II he moved to Paris where he intended to pursue his career as a journalist and aspiring writer. In 1942, with the publication of L'Etranger (translated in England as The Outsider and in the United States as The Stranger, 1946) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (translated as The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), he found instant fame and was widely and wrongly considered a major representative of the emerging existentialist movement. As an influential editorialist of Combat, France's leading daily in the immediate post-World War II period, he became a highly public figure and was perceived for a while, in international opinion, as the conscience of his nation. His instinctual rejection of ideologies and the carefully nurtured ambiguity which informs all his works and, in the eyes of several critics...