Still Cool Camus

French writer and philosopher Albert Camus died 50 years ago this week. The Daily Beast delves into why he's still cool and not forgotten.

From the piece...

In fact, the fight over Camus’ legacy has been going on for decades, and not just in France. Today he is claimed like no other 20th-century writer—Orwell not excepted—by both sides of the political spectrum. In his 2004 book, Camus and Sartre, Ronald Aronson positions Camus as neocon avatar, and in The Guardian in 2005 Marian Warner flagged Camus’ novel The Plague, a tale of a North African city attacked by a deadly pestilence, as a beacon for liberals in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. (“A study in terrorism,” Warner called the novel, “and a fable of redemption.”) In the summer of 2006, the press snickered when George W. Bush told reporters he was reading The Stranger on his summer vacation; perhaps he was taking his lead from Bobby Kennedy, who papered his office wall with quotes from Camus.

It was dying like James Dean—not just in a car crash but in a Facel Vega no less—that gave Camus a niche in popular culture. No other public intellectual could have inspired a single like The Cure’s “Killing an Arab” (1979—based on the incident around which The Stranger turns), a cameo appearance on the children’s show Madeline (in which a cartoon version of The Stranger’s protagonist, Meursault, is shown from his prison cell asking “Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?”), or Sacha Baron Cohen’s race-car driver in Talladega Nights, who whizzes around the track with L’Etranger propped open on his steering wheel.

No doubt Camus would have derived at least a moderate pleasure from his celebrity status. In his favorite photograph of himself, taken by Cartier Bresson, he’s wearing a trench coat (supposedly a gift from Arthur Koestler’s wife) and smoking a cigarette, and he loved it when his friends told him that he looked like Bogart in the picture. One wonders if French critics’ love affair avec Bogie didn’t begin with that photo. After all, as Susan Sontag wrote in her famous 1963 essay, “No modern writer I can think of, except Camus, has aroused love.”