5. Camus and Sartre—the breaks that made them inseparable

‘Camus and Sartre—the breaks that made them inseparable’ describes how Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre critically reviewed each other’s work and, despite some unfavourable comments, how they became firm friends when they eventually met in 1943. They mostly socialized and there were no long conversations about one another’s works. The point of divergence between Camus’s absurd and Sartre’s existentialism led to the writers’ first genuine row. The two men had another ongoing disagreement with respect to the question of political violence. In short, however, it was colonialism that was at the centre of the ongoing dispute between the two men.