ALBERT CAMUS was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he became a journalist. During World War II, he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and an editor of Combat, an underground newspaper he helped found. His fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom; his philosophical essays The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel and his plays The Just Assassins, The Misunderstanding, and Caligula have assured his preeminent position in modern literature and philosophy. In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.