Drawing upon the character of Sisyphus from the Greek Mythology, Camus beautifully constructs his theory of absurd , one of the greatest works of Existentialism. Sisyphus was condemned by gods to eternally push a boulder atop a mountain and subsequently see it roll down to its base. Camus uses the analogy to explain the absurdity of human existence in the universe. He also wrote fiction, plays and essays to expound the idea but The Myth of Sisyphus remains the crux of his philosophy.

About the Author

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian writer, philosopher and journalist. He was born in Mondovi, French Algeria on November 7, 1913. Although not trained as a philosopher, he contributed towards the avant-garde twentieth-century philosophical ideas of Absurdism in the form of essays, novels, reviews and articles. He also became active in the resistance against the colonial French government and served as editor in-chief of the newspaper Combat from 1944 to 1947.

Camus established himself as a fiction writer with his three novels: The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). His philosophical books The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and The Rebel (1951) proved him to be a forceful thinker. Because of his formidable impact on the world of letters in the second half of the twentieth century, he was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in 1957 for illuminating "the problems of the human conscience." He was only 44 years old at the time. He died in an automobile accident at the age of 46.