Youthful Writings
"These are the youthful writings of Albert Camus: essays, verse, parables, and fairy tales, written when he was nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. They are the secret writings of a young artist making awesome demands upon himself - assessing, rejecting, or assimilating the thoughts and styles of others, honing his craft, working out an aesthetic and a voice of his own as he learns to use the experience of his past for literary creation. The collection is divided by years. 1932 is represented by writings on Verlaine and Jehan Rictus (the "poet of poverty," with whom Camus identified); a critique of Bergson's latest work; an essay on Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's theories of music; and a series of parables in the form of dialogues with a fool, an old man, an alter ego. 1933: Notes on reading Stendhal, Gide, and Jean Grenier; The Moorish House and other fragments of prose; a long poem in celebration of the Mediterranean; contemplations on poverty and the death of a loved one; a dialogue between God and His Soul: a complex analysis of Art as a means to Divine Communion. 1934: Melusina's Book - three fairy tales written for his first wife, who loved fantasy - and Voices from the Poor Quarter with its foretaste of that purity of language, stripped of sentimentality, which marked Camus's mature style. The book begins with an extensive and penetrating introductory essay, "The First Camus," by the French critic Paul Viallaneix, in which Camus's youthful writings are set in perspective and related to his later published work. This is the second of the cahiers that Camus left unpublished. The first, A Happy Death, was published in 1972." -- Dust Jacket
Print Book, English, 1976
Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, New York, 1976