Uneducated, over- worked and withdrawn, catherine sint` es was a complex in■uence on her son. the young camus was drawn all the closer to his mother who brought him up in the working- class algiers district of belcourt where she earned her living cleaning houses. hemingway, dos passos, faulkner, cain, and others had pointed the way. he never knew his father who died on the battlefield in 1914, at the beginning of wwi. one was on horseback, the other on foot. 1 the schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. perhaps the most striking difference from sartre is his conception of the absurd. the myth of sisyphus an absurd reasoning absurdity and suicide there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. born on novem in the city camus pdf of algiers, algeria, albert camus was raised in a poor working family dominated by a stern grandmother. camus acknowledged employing an " american method" in writing the stranger, in the first half of the book in particular: the short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the " tough guy" tone. his cherished mother was half deaf and illiterate. they had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the schoolhouse built on the hillside. in his public statements camus insisted on his attach-. judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. albert camus the stranger pdf was in place, but the screws had been given only a few turns and their nickeled heads stuck out above the wood, which was stained dark walnut. an arab woman— a nurse, i supposed— was sitting beside the bier; she was wearing a blue smock and had a rather gaudy scarf wound round her hair. translated by justin o' brien. myth of sisyphus camus: the myth of sisyphus 1 albert camusgives a quite different account of philosophy and politics of existentialism from that of sartre.