Modern drama.

Camus, Albert

Born in Algeria, Camus was a French writer of novels, dramas, and essays. He worked as a journalist, an actor, and a manager of a theatrical company. Toward the end of World War II he worked for the French resistance movement against the Germans, and with Jean-Paul Sartre he coedited the left-wing newspaper Combat. In the midst of the war, while with the underground resistance press, Camus published his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. His writings revealed his discouragement at civilization's failure to cope with major moral issues. Camus was unable to accept the existence of God but constantly tried to find significant values in a meaningless world. His thought was often centered on the idea that the individual's position in the world was absurd. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.

Existentialism

A twentieth-century school of philosophy, existentialism first stresses that individuals are entirely free and thus entirely responsible for what they make of themselves. With this responsibility comes a profound sense of anguish and dread. Second, the philosophy stresses the absurdity of reality.

Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a term used to characterize plays that stress the illogical or irrational aspects of experience. Usually these plays show the pointlessness of life.