“The writer Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature 1957, died yesterday afternoon in a road accident which occurred at the Chapelle Champigny (Yonne). France loses one of its best writers and the youth of this country one of its masters of thought “, notes the” Leaflet of Neuchâtel “of January 5, 1960. He was 46 years old.
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“A dramatic author, the theater earned him as much success as his novels or essays,” recalls the daily. “Philosopher of the absurd, Camus has none the less, on the stage as in his books, proclaimed the dignity of justice and the necessity of heroism.”
Two works “L’envers et Lieu” (1937) and “Noces” (1938) had already made Camus known in a small intellectual circle, but it was “The Stranger” who, in 1942, revealed him to the general public. public. And then comes the novel that is talked about so much today: “The plague”, crowned in 1947 by the Critics’ Prize, placed it at the forefront of contemporary literature. Camus gives this plague various meanings, including the spread of the brown plague and Nazism.
“Camus was above all a honest man,” writes the Paris correspondent for the “Neuchâtel Notice Sheet”. “He abhorred publicity and continued to hold a few too neglected truths essential today. He was a free man, a straight man, a sincere and selfless writer. He had courage, he had shown it during the dark hours of the Occupation when he had to militate in the resistance movement Combat. “
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