Albert camus was born in the era of violence all around him. His father died fighting in the first world war. Moreover, he was unfit to join the second world war. He wondered and asked himself “ if our lives are meaningless?”. 

The banner of a new philosophy grew named Existentialism. This theory believes that people are born with blank slates. And everyone were responsible for their own creation of their own lives meaning in this chaotic world. But Albert came to a contradiction and rejected this principal. He said that all people were born with same human nature and bonded with common goals. And one such goal was to find just the meaning despite all this cruelty. He saw human desires for meaning and the universe's silent indifference as puzzle pieces that are incompatible. He saw putting these two together as absurd.

How to explore living without meaning?, became the guiding question behind Albert's work which he called “ the cycle of the absurd.” . His first novel “ The stranger” offers a very bleak response. 

“The stranger” shows Mersault, a  detached young person in the cruel world who does not see much meaning to anything. He does not cry at his mother's funeral, he even commited violent crime, but he feels no remorse or guilt. For him the world is in itself pointless. This creates hostility between Mersault and the society he live in and increases his alienation. 

By his novel, Albert Camus got celebrated for his philosophy and rose to fame. He continued writing works  that explored the value of life. He questions “ if life is meaningless? Should suicide be the better option?” And his answer came out as a straight “no”. He says that choosing to live regardless of the meaninglessness is the deepest expression of our genuine freedom. He explains this in one of his essays about sisyphus.

Sisyphus was a king who cheated the gods and was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Camus argues all of humanity is in that exact position. And only when we accept the meaninglessness of our lives, we can try to  face the absurd  with our own heads held high.

Camus began to work on his most lengthy and personal novel, an autobiographical work named “ The First Man.”  This was intended to be the first piece of hope in a new direction, the cycle of love. But he died in 1960, in a car accident and couldn't complete this cycle of love.