EDWARD CURTIN: On this date, January 4, in 1960, Albert Camus died in a
car crash at a point when he thought his true work had not even begun.
He was 46 years old. He had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and
The Plague, among other works. He had won the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Yet he felt that in his writing he had to hide behind a
mask that stifled him. After all these successes, as well as criticism
from the left and right French intelligentsia, he was looking forward
to a time when he would be able to speak his own truth without the mask
of depersonalization – to enter a period of création en liberté.
