Travels in the Americas

Albert Camus’s lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available in a new translation. In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, all that was about to change – ‘The Stranger’, his first book translated into English, would soon make him a literary star. By 1949, when he set out on a tour of South America, Camus was an international celebrity. Camus’s journals offer an intimate glimpse into his daily life during these eventful years and showcase his thinking at its most personal – a form of observational writing that the French call choses vues (things seen).