Camus

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.

Creates the absurdist philosophy and its literary expression — Camus's argument (that life has no inherent meaning, that this creates the absurd, and that the appropriate response is revolt — not suicide, not religion — but defiant engagement with a meaningless world) is the most psychologically authentic 20th-century philosophical position.