From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of writer Albert Camus, (books by this author) born in Mondovi, Algeria (1913). He spent his life writing novels and essays, and he was friends with the French existentialist philosophers. His father died in World War I when he was still a baby, and he grew up in poverty. When he was a teenager, he came down with tuberculosis. He recovered, but the disease kept returning for the rest of his life. As a young man he tried to become a philosophy teacher, but they turned him down because of his illness. Instead, he worked as a journalist, but what he really wanted to do was write novels. He said, "The only thing is to decide which is the most aesthetic form of suicide: marriage and a 40-hour-a-week job, or a revolver." He began to write, but he wasn't sure if his books would ever be any good. In 1940, he moved to an Algerian town called Oran, where he spent time on the beach. One day, he saw a friend of his get into a fight with some Arab men and threaten them with a pistol. Soon afterward, he worked the scene into a novel called The Stranger, which became his most famous book. The book begins, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." The narrator kills someone and goes to prison, where he eventually reconciles himself to his situation. He says, "For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again."

In the spring of 1940, Camus moved to Paris just as the war began with Nazi Germany. He got a job designing page layouts for a newspaper, and devoted most of his attention to writing The Stranger. He finished the book just before Hitler's tanks rolled into the city. In the turmoil of that time, he wrote letters to a woman named Francine, who soon became his wife. He said, "I only know that I will maintain what I believe to be true in my own universe, and as an individual I will give in to nothing."

The Stranger was published in 1942, followed by a collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus (1943). He also wrote The Plague (1947), a novel about the way ordinary people react when disease terrorizes their city. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and he was killed in a car accident in 1960. Camus said, "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."