The Fall

Front Cover
Knopf, 1957 - Fiction - 147 pages
Albert Camus ... chose a subject ... worthy of his supreme gifts: the conscience of modern man in the face of evil ... In ... Amsterdam, the man who does the talking in 'The Fall' is indulging in a calculated confession. He recalls his past life as a respected Parisian lawyer, a pleader of noble causes, secure in his self-esteem, privately a libertine, yet apparently immune to judgement, the portrait of a modern man. The irony of the recital predicts the downfall. Inescapable, it comes in the narrator's intense discovery, in the space of one terrible and unforgettable instant, that no man is innocent and no man may therefore judge others from a standpoint of righteousness.

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Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
17
Section 3
42
Copyright

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About the author (1957)

Born in 1913 in Algeria, Albert Camus was a French novelist, dramatist, and essayist. He was deeply affected by the plight of the French during the Nazi occupation of World War II, who were subject to the military's arbitrary whims. He explored the existential human condition in such works as L'Etranger (The Outsider, 1942) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942), which propagated the philosophical notion of the "absurd" that was being given dramatic expression by other Theatre of the Absurd dramatists of the 1950s and 1960s. Camus also wrote a number of plays, including Caligula (1944). Much of his work was translated into English. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Camus died in an automobile accident in 1960.

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