Camus on the Death Penalty

Over 50 years ago, though I cannot help remarking that the years seem impossible, Albert Camus remarked to my father -- at the time based in France as a State Department official and Partisan Review correspondent -- that he was at work on an essay on capital punishment. "Vous êtes contre," my father said, anticipating the thinking of a writer whose mind he had studied for years through his writings and for whose character he had some feeling, though the two were never close friends. "Bien entendu," Camus replied in his reserved way.