Albert Camus (1913-60) was a French philosopher, writer, and journalist, and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century letters. Among his widely read and translated works, the most notable are his novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, and the philosophical works The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Alice Kaplan is the Sterling Professor of French and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is coauthor of States of Plague, with Laura Marris, and author of French Lessons, Looking for The Stranger, and Dreaming in French, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. She has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut. Ryan Bloom is an essayist and translator who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the translator of Albert Camus's Notebooks 1951-1959.
"""An intimate glimpse into the psyche of a widely admired writer."" * Wall Street Journal * ""With its ample photographs, rich introduction, and smooth-flowing, conversational translation, Travels in the Americas is an engaging travel account that reintroduces Albert Camus as both a man and an existentialist icon moving through North and South America in the postwar years."" * Foreword Reviews * “Nine months after the end of the Second World War, Camus crossed the Atlantic on the SS Oregon to New York, traveling between ‘continents gone mad,’ as he put it. Three years later, he journeyed via Dakar to South America. This attractively illustrated new translation of the journals from those trips shows us an intensely curious, often solemn, and sometimes witty Camus as he attempts to understand the cultures he was encountering. As Alice Kaplan explains in her Introduction, the travel logs are an invitation to ‘see the Americas, as if for the first time, through his eyes,’ They also chart the writer’s transition towards literary celebrity and reveal the private doubts and needs that troubled him.” * Edward J. Hughes, author of 'Albert Camus' * ""Bloom’s translation is a model of tight writing... it reads briskly, as we would expect journal entries to read, and precisely, as we would expect of anything penned by Camus... Travels in the Americas is a small, beautiful gem, worthy of a large readership."" * Great Lakes Review * “An elegant new translation.” * London Review of Books *"