The 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."[1] He is the ninth French author to become a recipient of the prize after Catholic novelist François Mauriac in 1952, and the fourth philosopher after British analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1950.
Aged 44 when he received the prize, Camus is the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after only Rudyard Kipling (41).[2]
Camus made his debut as a writer in 1937, but his breakthrough came with the novel L’étranger ("The Stranger"), published in 1942. It concerns the absurdity of life, a theme he returns to in other books, including his philosophical work Le mythe de Sisyphe ("The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942). He also worked as a journalist and playwright with Caligula (1944), which received praises from theatre critics. Because of his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus was labeled an existentialist, but he preferred not to be linked with any ideology. His other successful novels include La peste ("The Plague", 1947), La chute ("The Fall", 1956), and an unfinished autobiography, Le Premier homme ("The First Man"), was published posthumously.[3][4]
Deliberations
Nominations
Albert Camus was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature on 11 occasions, the first time in 1949. He was nominated once in 1957 by a French professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature from the Caen University, which he was awarded afterwards.[5]
In his award ceremony speech on 10 December 1957 Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said of Camus:
"Active and highly creative, Camus is in the centre of interest in the literary world, even outside of France. Inspired by an authentic moral engagement, he devotes himself with all his being to the great fundamental questions of life, and certainly this aspiration corresponds to the idealistic end for which the Nobel Prize was established. Behind his incessant affirmation of the absurdity of the human condition is no sterile negativism. This view of things is supplemented in him by a powerful imperative, a nevertheless, an appeal to the will which incites to revolt against absurdity and which, for that reason, creates a value."[7]
