The first complete translation of Albert Camus’s personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, including new material never before published in English.
 
Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offer 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 offer 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 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 will 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 (1913–60) 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.

Translator’s Introduction

Notebook I: May 1935–September 1937
Notebook II: September 1937–April 1939
Notebook III: April 1939–February 1942
Notebook IV: January 1942–September 1945
Notebook V: September 1945–April 1948
Notebook VI: April 1948–June 1949
Travels in South America: June–August 1949
Notebook VI: September 1949–March 1951
Notebook VII: March 1951–December 1953
Notebook VIII: December 1953–July 1958
Drafts and Notes Tucked in Notebook VIII
Notebook IX: July 1958–

Appendix I. The First Notebook: 1933
Appendix II. The Oran Notebook: March 1938–August 1942
Index