Who was Simone Weil?
Print this article In 1957, when Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm, a reporter asked him which writers he felt the closest to. He gave two names: his close friend Rene Char and the philosophical mystic Simone Weil. By that point, Weil had been dead for over a decade, but Camus, according to Robert Zaretsky in The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, didn’t consider her physical absence a “barrier between friends.” Camus edited the manuscripts Weil left behind after her 1943 death from tuberculosis during his short stint as an editor at the prest...