ABOUT PERSONAL WRITINGS

The Nobel Prize winner’s most influential and enduring personal writings, newly curated and introduced by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus’s writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus’s personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought and humanize his most celebrated works.

Review

"A collection of brief, piercing personal pieces by the 1957 Nobel laureate . . . Camus reveals himself to readers, discussing his affections, regrets, memories, problems, complaints, and ideas about art and writing . . . What will strike many readers is the author’s extraordinarily evocative language, his astonishing facility to create memorable phrases and take readers to places most have never been but who, because of his artistry, feel immediately at home . . . Much eloquent—often lyrical—evidence that the author deserved his Nobel Prize." —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"This collection of essays reminds us that Camus offered a more difficult kind of inspiration — the sort that does not put us at ease but makes us uneasy; the sort that does not gloss life but gazes at it with open eyes." —Robert Zaretsky, The Los Angeles Review of Books