DJ blurb on Camus's The Fall and Exile And The Kingdom

The conscience of modern man in the face of evil is the theme of this extraordinary combination of "fictions," as Albert Camus called the combination of The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom. In a series of juxtaposed critical moments of human experience, the author explores his vision of the theme through a variety of perspectives and tones, ranging from the stream of consciousness to realistic narrative. In each instance, it has been Camus' concern to represent aspects of one human drama—man condemned by his nature and circumstances to spiritual exile, ever seeking an inner kingdom in which he may be reborn.

ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913; his death on January 4,1960, cut short the career of the most important literary figure of the Western world. Camus spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he began writing and doing work in the theater before he was twenty, and then journalism took him to metropolitan France. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the theatrical company L'Equipe, and during the war he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of the underground newspaper, Combat. In occupied France in 1942 he pub-lished the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus and the novel The Stranger. Among his other major writings are the essay The Rebel (published here in 1954), his plays (1958), and three novels: The Plague (1948), The Fall (1957), and Exile and the Kingdom (1958). A collection of his essays, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, was published posthumously in 1961.

When Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, the official citation accompanying this highest honor said that he was selected because of "his important literary production, which with clearsighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."