It wasn’t until beer advertisers decided to promote the holiday heavily in the 1980s that American celebration of Cinco de Mayo became widespread. It’s been celebrated in California since 1863, and grew in prominence in the rest of the country along with the Chicano movement of the 1940s. Cinco de Mayo isn’t widely celebrated in Mexico outside the state of Puebla, but it has been adopted by many Americans regardless of their heritage, much like St. It wasn’t a crucial battle in the course of the war, but became a symbol of Mexican pride and a celebration of Mexican culture in the United States. He was killed in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.Today is Cinco de Mayo, the Fifth of May, commemorating the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862 when 8,000 well-armed French troops were routed by 4,000 ill-equipped Mexican soldiers. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Among his major works are four widely praised works of fiction, The Stranger (1946), The Plague (1948), The Fall (1957), and Exile and the Kingdom (1958) a volume of plays, Caligula and Three Other Plays (1958) and two books of philosophical essays, The Rebel (1954) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), both of which are available in the Vintage series. In the thirties he ran a theatrical company, and during the war was active in the French Resistance, editing an important underground paper, Combat. After winning a degree in philosophy, he worked at various jobs, ending up in journalism. Similar themes can be seen in Camus's essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), also published in 1942.ĪLBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913.

Elements of this philosophy can be seen in the protagonist, Meursault, as he refuses to behave as if there is meaning where there is none-or, as Camus himself put it in a preface to The Stranger, Meursault 'does not play the game.' Society thus feels threatened and cuts off Meursault's head. Camus's concept of the absurd instead implored people to accept life's lack of meaning and rebel by rejoicing in what life does offer. Camus utilized The Stranger as a platform to explore absurdity, a concept central to his writings and at the core of his treatment of questions about the meaning of life.

It was published as The Outsider in England and as The Stranger in the United States. Opsis 2: The Stranger is the enigmatic first novel by Albert Camus, published in French as L' tranger in 1942.

Hrough the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed 'the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.' First published in English in 1946 now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

The stranger albert camus hardcover