Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World (The France Chicago Collection)

Synopsis

Albert Camus’s lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available again in a new translation. In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, all that was about to change—The Stranger, his first book translated into English, would soon make him a literary star. By 1949, when he set out on a tour of South America, Camus was an international celebrity. Camus’s journals offer an intimate glimpse into his daily life during these eventful years and showcase his thinking at its most personal—a form of observational writing that the French call choses vues (things seen). Camus’s journals from these travels record his impressions, frustrations, joys, and longings. Here are his unguarded first impressions of his surroundings and his encounters with publishers, critics, and members of the New York intelligentsia. Long unavailable in English, the journals have now been expertly retranslated by Ryan Bloom, with a new introduction by Alice Kaplan. Bloom’s translation captures the informal, sketch-like quality of Camus’s observations—by turns ironic, bitter, cutting, and melancholy—and the quick notes he must have taken after exhausting days of travel and lecturing. Bloom and Kaplan’s notes and annotations allow readers to walk beside the existentialist thinker as he experiences changes in his own life and the world around him, all in his inimitable style.

Copyright:

2023

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780226750408

Related ISBNs:

9780226694955

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

Date of Addition:

04/04/23

Copyrighted By:

Éditions GALLIMARD, Paris

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Biographies and Memoirs, Literature and Fiction

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.

Edited by:

Alice Kaplan

Translator:

Ryan Bloom