"Three years after he became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that "with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience," Albert Camus (November 7, 1913January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. The writings he left behind -- about the key to strength of character, about creativity as resistance, about the antidotes to the absurdity of life, about happiness as our moral obligation -- endure as a living testament to Mary Shelley's conviction that "it is by words that the worlds great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on."
