8 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher who wrote The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel — developing absurdism (the confrontation between human desire for meaning and the universe's silence) — winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at 44.
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher — author of The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus — Nobel Prize in Literature 1957 — creator of the absurdist philosophical and literary tradition — died in a car crash at 46.
Joseph Heller's 1961 satirical novel set in a WWII American bomber squadron — following Yossarian's attempts to be grounded as insane in a war where the insanity is institutional — which became the defining anti-war novel of American literature.
German-language Czech novelist and short story writer — author of The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle — who created the Kafkaesque and whose work defined 20th-century European literary absurdism — who requested all his work be destroyed at his death.
Franz Kafka's 1915 novella — in which Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect — the most widely read work of European modernist fiction and the definition of the adjective 'Kafkaesque.'
Albert Camus's 1942 philosophical essay arguing that the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is worth living in the face of absurdity (the conflict between humans' need for meaning and the universe's silence) — concluding that one must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus's 1947 novel — about a bubonic plague outbreak in Oran, Algeria — which became a metaphor for Nazi occupation and reads now as the definitive novel about collective response to epidemic disease.
Albert Camus's 1942 novel — about Meursault, the emotionally detached Algerian who kills an Arab and is condemned as much for his lack of grief at his mother's death as for the murder — the defining absurdist novel.