Personal Writings

This volume contains some of Camus's most personal and lyrical writing, as he reflects on his identity and childhood in Algeria and celebrates the beauty of the Mediterranean. The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Camus's first book and most openly autobiographical work, describes his early years in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers and includes memorable portraits of his mother, grandmother and uncle. Nuptials rejoices in the sun, landscape and sea, and the physical and spiritual freedom they offer to even the poorest. And in Summer, Camus evocatively depicts the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran.

“It was the discovery of the essays celebrating his childhood and youth that altered my perception of him, from a thinker to a writer whose intellectual lucidity was a product of the wealth - the sensual immediacy and clarity - that had been heaped on his senses”

Probably no European writer of his time left so deep a mark on the imagination -- Conor Cruise O'Brien It was the discovery of the essays celebrating his childhood and youth that altered my perception of him, from a thinker to a writer whose intellectual lucidity was a product of the wealth - the sensual immediacy and clarity - that had been heaped on his senses -- Geoff Dyer

Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.