Complete Notebooks

The first complete translation of Albert Camus’s personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, published for the first time in one comprehensive volume.
 
Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offers an unrivaled glimpse into the writer at his most personal and reflective. These notebooks contain his thoughts on politics, solitude, personal failings and regrets, his travels, and his relationships with friends and rivals. They also provide insight into his process as a thinker—his frustrations, his ideas for novels and plays (some pursued and others abandoned), his routines, his aspirations, and his self-recriminations.

For Camus devotees, there is no more intimate experience than reading these notebooks. On the one hand, his fallibility is on full display: He is irritated by mediocrity, frustrated with his health, plagued by insomnia, and miserable about life’s petty necessities. Yet, he is also intensely curious and observant, sometimes moved to rapture by landscapes and people. Readers will experience the bounty of Camus’s philosophical imagination and witness firsthand how his ideas take shape. The notebooks contain drafts of letters to friends and recorded reflections on the compromises that being in the world demands.

This publication marks the first time Camus’s complete notebooks have been published in one comprehensive volume. Expertly and movingly translated by Ryan Bloom with extensive footnotes contextualizing the entries, The Complete Notebooks will remain a literary treasure for years to come.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French philosopher, writer, and journalist and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century letters. His widely read and translated works include the novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall and the philosophical texts The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. 

Ryan Bloom is a literary translator, fiction writer, and essayist from Washington, DC. His translations of Camus’s work include “Caligula” and Three Other Plays, Travels in the Americas, The First Man: The Graphic Novel, and Notebooks 1951–1959. He is a 2024–2025 Guggenheim Fellow and a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University.