Albert Camus, the French novelist, playwright, journalist, philosopher and Nobel Prize winner was born on this day, November 7, one hundred years ago.
This is a good occasion to highlight a small manuscript fragment from Camus’s 1951 essay L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, translated in English as The Rebel) which was recently re-discovered on the shelves of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (shelfmark MS Q.216 C15h).
Small graph paper pages in Camus’s hand were pasted on seventeen larger leaves with annotations in blue ink, also in Camus’s hand. These pages appear to be a draft or variants of the fourth section of the essay, titled “Révolte et Art”, and its sub-sections “Roman et révolte,” Révolte et style” and “Création et révolution.” The manuscript pages are followed by a series of six newspaper clippings relating to an exchange of open letters in the weekly review Arts between André Breton and Albert Camus about L’Homme révolté. This fragment, bound in red morocco, was acquired from R. Simonson in 1966. CS
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The Cité du Livre – Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence (France) houses Albert Camus’s archives in its Centre Albert Camus: http://www.citedulivre-aix.com/Typo3/fileadmin/documents/Expositions/centrecamus/
I love those old things and Albert was such a great writer and journalist. Thi manuscript is really important for the rest of the world and I hope everybody will see this, because we´re living in an complicated world of fast communication and sometimes have to remember what happened in the past.