Fame! A Misunderstanding

EACH NEW TRANSLATION of a work from a major author should spark a reevaluation of that author’s critical reception and public reputation. Since his death in 1960, a number of posthumously published works by Albert Camus have been translated into English. This has included A Happy Death (1971), his abandoned first novel; The First Man (1994), his unfinished final novel; and several collections of lyrical essays, journalism, lectures, correspondence, and notebooks, covering his entire creative life. And yet the public image of Camus has remained stubbornly unchanged since his initial reception in the 1940s, with each new translation either reinforcing a caricature—Camus as an existentialist or a philosopher of the absurd—or else simply not being read at all because of how uninteresting this caricature was. It is a silhouette projected as much by admirers of Camus as it is by those indifferent or hostile to him.