Albert Camus

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.

Created absurdism as a philosophical position — Camus's argument in The Myth of Sisyphus that we must imagine Sisyphus happy (that living fully in the face of absurdity is the only honest response to a meaningless universe) provided an alternative to both nihilism and religious consolation that resonated with post-WWII European readers.