Albert Camus won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature for illuminating the problems of the human conscience in his time. The Swedish Academy used this wording to recognize his literary work and philosophical engagement with moral responsibility, freedom, and human suffering.
Camus was born in Mondovi, French Algeria, in 1913 and became a major French-language writer, journalist, and essayist. His best-known works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel. His writing is often associated with absurdism, although Camus himself resisted being labeled an existentialist.
Camus was 44 when he received the prize, making him one of the younger literature laureates. He was also the second-youngest recipient at that time, after Rudyard Kipling. A common mix-up is confusing Camus with Jean-Paul Sartre: Sartre won the literature prize in 1964 but declined it, whereas Camus accepted the 1957 award. Camus died in a car accident in France in 1960.