Camus in Absurdistan

He was nearly denied entry- an official representative of the French government- and, due to the privations of the war, met The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling in  what the latter described as "an absurd suit."

But Albert Camus quickly got down to business:

In “La crise de l’homme,” or “The Crisis of Man” — the title he gave to his talk — Camus set himself an enormous task. To a packed auditorium of mostly young Americans, he sought to convey the character and consequences of events that, while scarcely touching his audience, had ravaged Europe. “The men and women of my generation,” he began, 

"were born just before or during World War One, reached adolescence in time for the Great Depression, and turned 20 years old when Hitler took power. To complete our education, we were offered the Spanish Civil War, Munich, and another world war followed by defeat, occupation, and resistance."

This upbringing, Camus drily concluded, made for an “interesting generation.” Faced by the absurdity of these events, his generation had to find reasons to resist and rebel. Where, though, could they be found? Neither religion nor politics offered guidance, while traditional morality was a “monstrous hypocrisy.” On a continent swept by mass murder and terrorism, a world awash in nihilism, Camus’s generation was thrust into the most terrifying of contradictions. “We hated both war and violence, yet we had to accept both one and the other.” They confronted, in short, the crisis of man.