This Saturday marks the anniversary of the premature death of the Nobel Prize winning philosopher Albert Camus, who was born in 1913 and died in a car accident in 1960. Found in his pocket was a train ticket, which he’d intended to use that day, before deciding to accept the last-minute ride. Or maybe he was killed by the KGB.

His death may have been arbitrary, or it may have been deliberate and political. As we learn in Robert Zaretsky’s biography, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, both would befit the brilliant philosopher who believed in standing up against the intimidating absurdity of the universe by leading a meaningful life.

This conviction led him to develop a philosophy that seized the zeitgeist of the French intelligentsia and to embrace (and reject) various political causes. As a French-Algerian, he was especially conflicted about France’s relationship with his native country, and struggled throughout his intellectual life with the relationship between his belief in rebellion and his opposition to meaningless death and violence.

But his most popular contribution to popular thought was probably The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he compared the human quest for meaning with the fate of Sisyphus, who was doomed for eternity to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, and then push it back up.

Zaretsky writes that while Sisyphus became a symbol of life’s absurdity and Camus’s legacy, it may have been Prometheus with whom he identified more directly. Prometheus was a god who defied Zeus by giving the gift of fire to humanity, and in punishment, he was chained to a pillar while an eagle pecked away at his liver for eternity.

In 1937, five years before he published The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus adapted Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound for the stage. Like any myth, this one is open to interpretation. Zaretsky writes that the Prometheus of Hesiod’s Theogon is just an ancient con man, a "fast-talking Titan who repeatedly scams Zeus," his actions motivated more by a childish urge to provoke more than anything else. But the Prometheus of Aeschylus and Camus is "austere and terrifying," not intimidated by Zeus or his punishment, refusing to give in "Until the indignity of these chains is undone." For a leftist during the time of French-Algerian tension, the theme of torture must have struck a chord, and Camus in his devoted rebellion found a kindred spirit in Prometheus.

Camus would later write, "A revolution is always carried out against the Gods -- from that of Prometheus onwards." That is, a revolution is fought not only against a specific power structure, but against the very idea of power. This was around the same time that Camus joined the Communist Party, and in the theater company’s manifesto, Camus wrote that theater could be used for political ends. The Soviet cause he once championed might have led to his death, but from Camus’s perspective, nothing about his political conviction could be deemed futile.