Description
A Happy Death (originally titled La mort heureuse) is a novel by the French philosopher Albert Camus. The existential goal of the novel is the “will to happiness,” the conscious creation of one’s own happiness, and the need for the time (and money) to do so. It is based on the author’s recollections, including his job at the Maritime Commission in Algeria, his struggle with tuberculosis, and his travels to Europe.
Camus wrote and reworked the novel between 1936 and 1938, then decided not to publish it. It was finally published in 1971, more than 10 years after the author’s death. The English translation by Richard Howard appeared in 1972.
A Happy Death was Camus’s first novel and was clearly a precursor to his more famous work, The Stranger, published in 1942. The main character in A Happy Death is named “Patrice Meursault,” similar to Meursault’s novel The Stranger; both are French Algerian writers who murder another man. A Happy Death is written in the third person, while The Stranger is written in the first person. The novel contains over 100 pages and consists of two parts.
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