The Swedish Academy announced that Albert Camus, author of The Stranger and The Plague, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human condition." At 44, he was one of the youngest laureates ever honored, and the announcement stunned even Camus, who reportedly told a friend he thought Andre Malraux deserved it more.
Camus learned the news at a café near his publisher's office in Paris and was reportedly so unsettled he initially thought the prize should have gone to Malraux, a writer he admired more and considered more deserving on grounds of seniority and body of work. He wrote a letter of gratitude to his old teacher, Louis Germain, who had helped a poor boy from colonial Algeria reach a lycée education, tracing his success directly back to that one teacher's intervention.
The award came at a fraught moment: Camus was caught between his French identity and his birth in Algeria, then in the midst of a brutal war of independence, and his refusal to fully back either side had cost him friendships and credibility with intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, from whom he'd split publicly years earlier over Communism. Barely three years later, in January 1960, Camus died in a car crash at 46, an unused train ticket reportedly in his pocket. His Nobel lecture's insistence that art must never serve as an excuse for silence in the face of injustice remains one of the most quoted defenses of the writer's public duty.
Key people: Albert Camus