Camus described this brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'. Published in 1951, it expresses his horror at the events of a period which 'within fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings'. Hope for the future, he argues lies in revolt, which unlike revolution, is a spontaneous response to injustice and a chance to achieve change without giving up individual or collective freedom .

The Rebel created an irreconcilable rift between Camus and his friend Jean-Paul Sartre who bitterly attacked Camus for his criticism of communism.

In this vibrant, engaging biography of Albert Camus, the internationally acclaimed author of The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has richly tapped resources never before available,personal correspondence, notebooks, public records, as well as exclusive interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, mentors, and lovers. What emerges is the study of a man caught in conflicts between family loyalties and his own passionate nature, between the call to political action and devotion to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten poor whites. Exploring Camus's impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, his underground activities during the Occupation in Paris, the intrigues of the French literati who embraced him after the publication of his first novel, L'Etranger, Todd uncovers the solitary private man behind the mask of his celebrity. He shows us a writer isolated by his own success, crippled by the charms of women he could not resist, debilitated by the tuberculosis that did not kill him. The auto accident that did adds only to the ironies in the life of this international giant of twentieth-century literature.

Albert Camus is among the most significant French writers of the twentieth century. His novels, THE PLAGUE and THE OUTSIDER,have a timeless power and appeal and are studied all over the world,and hisphilosophical work has had an enduring influence. Oliver Todd has been authorised by Camus' family to write the definitive life. Opening with his impoverished childhood in Algiers , Todd brings the historical context to life, shedding light on Camus' later agonising conflict between sympathy for the working class Algerians and for the French colonials with a stake in their adopted land. His life pre- sented impossible choices and perpetual struggle: his intimacy with the Gallimard family, despite their collaborationist activities; his involvement in the conflict between Satre and de Beauvoir; his own battles with debilitating bouts of tuberculosis and with the passion- ate, restless nature that would never let him settle. Because Todd understands his subject and his times so well, he brings to this rich,generous biography a rare immediacy and perception, evoking a great writer and his would with memorable force and engaging subtlety