Camus Comes to America

The 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as absolute freedom, beholden to no limits and no enduring truths. In contrast, the author of The Stranger and The Plague rejected Sartre’s facile nihilism, as well as his repellant accommodation with murderous messianism, typically conveyed in fashionable leftist nostrums. The more hopeful side of Camus comes through in his recently re-released Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World.