On this same day, 1960, I was sitting in a UCLA lecture hall, listening to my professor lecture on existentialism. Suddenly one of his Teaching Assistants came to the podium and whispered in his ear. The professor set down his notes. He told us that Camus had just been killed in an automobile accident, and the professor went on to give a spontaneous lecture on existentialism that was more dramatic than the one in his notes.
Albert Camus, The First Man
On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris at the age of forty-seven. On the basis of his novel The Outsider (1942), his "philosophical prose-poem" The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), his plays, his Nobel Prize (1957), his political activism, and his Humphrey Bogart good looks, Camus was elevated to almost cult status in the middle decades of the century. |
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