Albert Camus

French-Algerian · b. 1913

Albert Camus grew up poor in French Algeria, played goalkeeper, edited a Resistance newspaper under Nazi occupation, and won the Nobel Prize at 44 — the second-youngest laureate ever. His philosophy of the absurd, dramatized in The Stranger and argued in The Myth of Sisyphus, asked how to live without illusions; he died in a car crash at 46 with an unused train ticket in his pocket.