A Typewritten Draft Page With Autograph Corrections From Albert Camus’s Famous The Crisis Of Man Speech Given At Columbia University In 1946

ALBERT CAMUS (1913-1960). Camus was a Nobel Prize-winning French author best known for his absurdism and works like The Stranger and The Plague. TM. 1pgs. N.d. [1946]. N.p. One page of a typed draft of Albert Camus’s famous “The Crisis of Man” (or “The Human Crisis”) speech, with autograph corrections. Camus delivered this landmark speech at Columbia University on March 28, 1946, during his only trip to the United States. Asked to talk about the French sensibility, Camus delivered a compelling meditation about the Second World War and the crisis facing all humanity. The tone is both stirring and thought-provoking. Camus had been a resistance fighter during the war, and his experiences obviously color his speech, particularly in his descriptions of atrocities committed during the war. In 2016, Columbia held an event to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Camus’s speech. There, actor Viggo Mortensen read Camus’s speech to a sold-out crowd in the Miller Theatre – the same venue where Camus had spoken. Even three-quarters of a century after its debut, “The Crisis of Man” remains relevant and timely, and people continue to reflect on it today. The draft, which is the second page of the speech, is written in French and has several dozen handwritten words in Camus’s diminutive handwriting. The English translation of the typewritten portion is as follows: “… Mr. Smith, Mr. Durand, Herr Vogel, but no commonality among these three particular phenomena. The moral attitude of this generation was even more categorical: nationalism seemed to it an outmoded truth and religion an escape. 25 years of international politics have taught this generation to be skeptical of any notion of purity and to think that nobody was ever right or wrong. As for the traditional morality of our society, it seemed to us that it hadn’t ceased being what it had always been, namely a monstruous hypocrisy. So we lived in negation. Of course, that was nothing new. Other generations and other countries in other historical periods experienced this. But what is new is that these same men, strangers to any kind of values, had to adapt their personal position in regard to murder and terror. That is when they knew they had to acknowledge that there might be a Human Crisis, as they had to live a most wrenching contradiction. They had, after all, entered war the way one enters Hell, if it is true that Hell is the ultimate denial. They loved neither war nor violence, yet they had to accept war and practice violence. The only thing they hated was Hate itself. Yet they had to acquire this difficult skill. In plain contradiction with themselves, without having any traditional values at their disposal, they had to deal with the most grievous problem which…ever…So here is on the one side a singular generation…and on the other side a crisis…which has the dimension of the world and of human conscience and which I would now like to characterize as clearly as possible”. It is written on onion skin paper and is in very good condition, with some minor toning.