Volume 29, Number 18 · November 18, 1982
The Rebel
By Frederick Brown
Camus
by Patrick McCarthy
Random House, 359 pp., $17.95
During the last three or four years of his life, after the publication of The Fall, Albert Camus had a writer's block which he was desperately trying to overcome when he died in an automobile crash in 1960 at age forty-six. Many events contributed to his inability to write. There had been the famous debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over terror in the USSR, from which, in the verdict of many Parisian intellectuals, he came away the loser. Then the French-Algerian was broke out, and his unwillingness to espouse the cause of Algerian independence diminished still more his reputation among the left. Awarded the Nobel prize just at the moment when the press was demanding that he state a clearcut position on Algeria, he found himself in the position of an old actor suddenly afflicted by stage fright, trying to speak his lines while a hostile audience was making for the exit.
Review, 5009 words
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