The standard interpretation keeps repeating that Camus is the prototypical “absurdist” thinker. Such a reading freezes Camus at the stage at which he wrote
The Stranger
and
The Myth of Sisyphus.
By taking seriously how (1) Camus was always searching and (2) the rest of his corpus,
Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary
corrects the one-sided, and thus faulty, depiction of Camus as committed to a philosophy of absurdism. His guiding project, which he explicitly acknowledged, was an attempt to get beyond nihilism, the general dismissal of value and meaning in ordinary life. Tracing this project via Camus's works,
,
offers a new lens for thinking about the well-known author.