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Lyrical and Critical Essays by  Albert Camus Preface 1958 [by Albert Camus] The essays collected in this volume were written in 1935 and 1936 (I was then twenty-two) and published a year later in Algeria in a very limited edition. This edition has been unobtainable for a long time and I have always refused to have   The Wrong Side and the Right Side   reprinted. There are no mysterious reasons for my stubbornness. I reject nothing of what these writings express, but their form has always seemed clumsy to me. The prejudices on art I cherish in spite of myself (I shall explain them further on) kept me for a long time from considering their republication. A great vanity, it would seem, leading one to suppose that my other writings satisfy every standard. Need I say this isn’t so? I am only more aware of the inadequacies in   The Wrong Side and the Right Side   than of those in my other work. How can I explain this except by admitting that the...

Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus Introduction [by editor, Philip Thody] A LTHOUGH   Camus’s greatest achievements as a creative writer are undoubtedly to be found in his novels and his plays, his literary career nevertheless both began and ended with the publication of a volume of essays. Between the appearance of   L’Envers et l’Endroit   in 1937 and the publication of his Nobel Prize speeches in 1958, he developed and extended his use of the essay form to express both his personal attitude toward life and certain artistic values. He also wrote articles on political topics, and a selection of these, under the title   Actuelles , takes up three volumes of his complete works. But these articles, however perfect their style, did not really fall under Camus’s definition of the essay. For him, it was first and foremost what its etymology suggests: an attempt to express something, a trying out of ideas and forms, an experiment. It was not a polemi...