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Albert Camus (1913–60) was a French philosopher, writer, and journalist, and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century letters. Among his widely read and translated works, the most notable are his novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall and the philosophical works The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Alice Kaplan is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. She is coauthor of States of Plague, with Laura Marris, and author of Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris and Looking for “The Stranger.” She has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut. Ryan Bloom is a literary translator, fiction writer, and essayist from Washington, DC. His other translations of Camus’s work include Caligula and Three Other Plays, The First Man: The Graphic Novel, and Notebooks 1951–1959.
""An intimate glimpse into the psyche of a widely admired writer."" * Wall Street Journal * “An elegant new translation.” * London Review of Books * ""With its ample photographs, rich introduction, and smooth-flowing, conversational translation, Travels in the Americas is an engaging travel account that reintroduces Albert Camus as both a man and an existentialist icon moving through North and South America in the postwar years."" * Foreword Reviews * ""Bloom’s translation is a model of tight writing... it reads briskly, as we would expect journal entries to read, and precisely, as we would expect of anything penned by Camus... Travels in the Americas is a small, beautiful gem, worthy of a large readership."" * Great Lakes Review * ""Much more than a riveting travelogue, Travels in the Americas provides a glimpse into the mind of one of the last century’s most astounding thinkers, a man whom communists, socialists, existentialists, and anti-colonialists all endeavored to call their own, but who always evaded their grasps. From France to the Americas and back again, he felt himself caught between two unfortunate places: one with an impossible past, the other with an impossible future."" * France-Amérique * ""We glean from this book a great deal about Camus’s approach as a writer and thinker. By offering us insights into the workings of his mind through largely un-retouched journal commentaries, his prose yields a strongly unified vision of a better possible world governed by reason and moral values. The book’s production, editing, and translations are first-rate, making this slim volume indispensable reading for scholars specializing in twentieth-century literature."" * The European Legacy * ""[Camus's] written impressions of these visits to the Americas are beautifully presented in the volume reviewed here, with helpful notes, over a dozen images, a fine contextual introduction by Alice Kaplan, two appendices of 1946 New York press clippings, and an index. . . . [These journals] show a writer fascinated by the practices of ordinary people in their intoxications and in their efforts to make human connection against and despite the immensities of life."" * American Literary History * “Nine months after the end of the Second World War, Camus crossed the Atlantic on the SS Oregon to New York, traveling between ‘continents gone mad,’ as he put it. Three years later, he journeyed via Dakar to South America. This attractively illustrated new translation of the journals from those trips shows us an intensely curious, often solemn, and sometimes witty Camus as he attempts to understand the cultures he was encountering. As Alice Kaplan explains in her Introduction, the travel logs are an invitation to ‘see the Americas, as if for the first time, through his eyes,’ They also chart the writer’s transition towards literary celebrity and reveal the private doubts and needs that troubled him.” * Edward J. Hughes, author of 'Albert Camus' *
