Sartre paid tribute to him in his obituary notice- ‘Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century.’;‘One of the great humanist manifestos’ The Times;Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature;‘The last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language … a figure of immense moral stature’ Sunday Times

The Rebel is Camus’s ‘attempt to understand the time I live in’ and a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Published in 1951, it makes a daring critique of communism - how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting totalitarian regimes. It questions two events held sacred by the left wing - the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 - that had resulted, he believed, in terrorism as a political instrument.

In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt, which unlike revolution is a spontaneous response to injustice and a chance to achieve change without giving up collective and intellectual freedom.