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und on the mountain passes.
The Roman expansion brought the defeat of the Allobrogi in 121 BC and during the Gallic Wars in 58 BC Julius Caesar overcame the Helvetii. The Rhaetians continued to resist but were eventually conquered when the Romans turned northward to the Danube valley in Austria and defeated the Brigantes. The Romans built settlements in the Alps; towns such as Aosta named for Augustus in Italy, Martigny and Lausanne in Switzerland, and Partenkirchen in Bavaria show remains of Roman baths, villas, arenas and temples. Much of the Alpine region was gradually settled by Germanic tribes, Lombards, Alemanni, Bavarii, and Franks from the 6th to the 13th centuries mixing with the local Celtic tribes.
Christianity, feudalism, and Napoleonic wars
Christianity was established in the region by the Romans, and saw the establishment of monasteries and churches in the high regions. The Frankish expansion of the Carolingian Empire and the Bavarian expansion in the eastern Alps introduced feudalism and the
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building of castles to support the growing number of dukedoms and kingdoms. Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, Italy, still has intricate frescoes, excellent examples of Gothic art, in a tower room. In Switzerland, Chteau de Chillon is preserved as an example of medieval architecture.
Much of the medieval period was a time of power struggles between competing dynasties such as the House of Savoy, the Visconti in northern Italy and the House of Habsburg in Austria and Slovenia. In 1291, to protect themselves from incursions by the Habsburgs, four cantons in the middle of Switzerland drew up a charter that is considered to be a declaration of independence from neighbouring kingdoms. After a series of battles fought in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, more cantons joined the confederacy and by the 16th century Switzerland was wellestablished as a separate state.
During the Napoleonic Wars in the late 18th century and early 19th century, Napoleon annexed territory formerly controlled by the Habsburgs and
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Savoys. In 1798, he established the Helvetic Republic in Switzerland; two years later he led an army across the St. Bernard pass and conquered almost all of the Alpine regions.
After the fall of Napolon, many alpine countries developed heavy protections to prevent any new invasion. Thus, Savoy built a series of fortifications in the Maurienne valley in order to protect the major alpine passes, such as the col du MontCenis that was even crossed by Charlemagne and his father to defeat the Lombards. The later indeed became very popular after the construction of a paved road ordered by Napolon Bonaparte.
The Barrire de l'Esseillon is a series of forts with heavy batteries, built on a cliff with a perfect view of the valley, a gorge on one side and steep mountains on the other side.
In the 19th century, the monasteries built in the high Alps during the medieval period to shelter travellers and as places of pilgrimage, became tourist destinations. The Benedictines had built monasteries in Lucerne, Switzerland, an
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d Oberammergau; the Cistercians in the Tyrol and at Lake Constance; and the Augustinians had abbeys in the Savoy and one in the centre of Interlaken, Switzerland. The Great St Bernard Hospice, built in the 9th or 10th centuries, at the summit of the Great Saint Bernard Pass was a shelter for travellers and place for pilgrims since its inception; by the 19th century it became a tourist attraction with notable visitors such as author Charles Dickens and mountaineer Edward Whymper.
Exploration
Radiocarbondated charcoal placed around 50,000 years ago was found in the Drachloch Dragon's Hole cave above the village of Vattis in the canton of St. Gallen, proving that the high peaks were visited by prehistoric people. Seven bear skulls from the cave may have been buried by the same prehistoric people. The peaks, however, were mostly ignored except for a few notable examples, and long left to the exclusive attention of the people of the adjoining valleys. The mountain peaks were seen as terrifying, the abode of dra
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gons and demons, to the point that people blindfolded themselves to cross the Alpine passes. The glaciers remained a mystery and many still believed the highest areas to be inhabited by dragons.
Charles VII of France ordered his chamberlain to climb Mont Aiguille in 1356. The knight reached the summit of Rocciamelone where he left a bronze triptych of three crosses, a feat which he conducted with the use of ladders to traverse the ice. In 1492, Antoine de Ville climbed Mont Aiguille, without reaching the summit, an experience he described as "horrifying and terrifying." Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by variations of light in the higher altitudes, and climbed a mountainscholars are uncertain which one; some believe it may have been Monte Rosa. From his description of a "blue like that of a gentian" sky it is thought that he reached a significantly high altitude. In the 18th century four Chamonix men almost made the summit of Mont Blanc but were overcome by altitude sickness and snowblindness.
Conrad Gessn
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er was the first naturalist to ascend the mountains in the 16th century, to study them, writing that in the mountains he found the "theatre of the Lord". By the 19th century more naturalists began to arrive to explore, study and conquer the high peaks. Two men who first explored the regions of ice and snow were HoraceBndict de Saussure 17401799 in the Pennine Alps, and the Benedictine monk of Disentis Placidus a Spescha 17521833. Born in Geneva, Saussure was enamoured with the mountains from an early age; he left a law career to become a naturalist and spent many years trekking through the Bernese Oberland, the Savoy, the Piedmont and Valais, studying the glaciers and the geology, as he became an early proponent of the theory of rock upheaval. Saussure, in 1787, was a member of the third ascent of Mont Blanctoday the summits of all the peaks have been climbed.
The Romantics and Alpinists
Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen 1732 described the mountains as an area of mythical purity. JeanJacques Rousseau wa
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s another writer who presented the Alps as a place of allure and beauty, in his novel Julie, or the New Heloise 1761, Later the first wave of Romantics such as Goethe and Turner came to admire the scenery; Wordsworth visited the area in 1790, writing of his experiences in The Prelude 1799. Schiller later wrote the play William Tell 1804, which tells the story the legendary Swiss marksman William Tell as part of the greater Swiss struggle for independence from the Habsburg Empire in the early 14th century. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Alpine countries began to see an influx of poets, artists, and musicians, as visitors came to experience the sublime effects of monumental nature.
In 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley visited Geneva and all three were inspired by the scenery in their writings. During these visits Shelley wrote the poem "Mont Blanc", Byron wrote "The Prisoner of Chillon" and the dramatic poem Manfred, and Mary Shelley, who found the scenery overwhelming, concei
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ved the idea for the novel Frankenstein in her villa on the shores of Lake Geneva in the midst of a thunderstorm. When Coleridge travelled to Chamonix, he declaimed, in defiance of Shelley, who had signed himself "Atheos" in the guestbook of the Hotel de Londres near Montenvers, "Who would be, who could be an atheist in this valley of wonders".
By the mid19th century scientists began to arrive en masse to study the geology and ecology of the region.
From the beginning of the 19th century, the tourism and mountaineering development of the Alps began. In the early years of the "golden age of alpinism" initially scientific activities were mixed with sport, for example by the physicist John Tyndall, with the first ascent of the Matterhorn by Edward Whymper being the highlight. In the later years, the "silver age of alpinism", the focus was on mountain sports and climbing. The first president of the Alpine Club, John Ball, is considered the discoverer of the Dolomites, which for decades were the focus of climber
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s like Paul Grohmann, Michael Innerkofler and Angelo Dibona.
The Nazis
Austrianborn Adolf Hitler had a lifelong romantic fascination with the Alps and by the 1930s established a home at Berghof, in the Obersalzberg region outside of Berchtesgaden. His first visit to the area was in 1923 and he maintained a strong tie there until the end of his life. At the end of World War II, the US Army occupied Obersalzberg, to prevent Hitler from retreating with the Wehrmacht into the mountains.
By 1940 many of the Alpine countries were under the control of the Axis powers. Austria underwent a political coup that made it part of the Third Reich; France had been invaded and Italy was a fascist regime. Switzerland and Liechtenstein were the only countries to avoid an Axis takeover. The Swiss Confederation mobilized its troopsthe country follows the doctrine of "armed neutrality" with all males required to have military traininga number that General Eisenhower estimated to be about 850,000. The Swiss commanders wired the
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infrastructure leading into the country with explosives, and threatened to destroy bridges, railway tunnels and roads across passes in the event of a Nazi invasion; and if there was an invasion the Swiss army would then have retreated to the heart of the mountain peaks, where conditions were harsher, and a military invasion would involve difficult and protracted battles.
German Ski troops were trained for the war, and battles were waged in mountainous areas such as the battle at Riva Ridge in Italy, where the American 10th Mountain Division encountered heavy resistance in February 1945. At the end of the war, a substantial amount of Nazi plunder was found stored in Austria, where Hitler had hoped to retreat as the war drew to a close. The salt mines surrounding the Altaussee area, where American troops found of gold coins stored in a single mine, were used to store looted art, jewels, and currency; vast quantities of looted art were found and returned to the owners.
Largest cities
The largest city within
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the Alps is the city of Grenoble in France. Other larger and important cities within the Alps with over 100,000 inhabitants are in Tyrol with Bolzano Italy, Trento Italy and Innsbruck Austria. Larger cities outside the Alps are Milan, Verona, Turin Italy, Munich Germany, Graz, Vienna, Salzburg Austria, Ljubljana, Maribor, Kranj Slovenia, Zurich, Geneva Switzerland, Nice and Lyon France.
Cities with over 100,000 inhabitants in the Alps are
Alpine people and culture
The population of the region is 14 million spread across eight countries. On the rim of the mountains, on the plateaus and the plains the economy consists of manufacturing and service jobs whereas in the higher altitudes and in the mountains farming is still essential to the economy. Farming and forestry continue to be mainstays of Alpine culture, industries that provide for export to the cities and maintain the mountain ecology.
The Alpine regions are multicultural and linguistically diverse. Dialects are common, and vary from valley to valley
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and region to region. In the Slavic Alps alone 19 dialects have been identified. Some of the Romance dialects spoken in the French, Swiss and Italian alps of Aosta Valley derive from Arpitan, while the southern part of the western range is related to Occitan; the German dialects derive from Germanic tribal languages. Romansh, spoken by two percent of the population in southeast Switzerland, is an ancient RhaetoRomanic language derived from Latin, remnants of ancient Celtic languages and perhaps Etruscan.
Much of the Alpine culture is unchanged since the medieval period when skills that guaranteed survival in the mountain valleys and in the highest villages became mainstays, leading to strong traditions of carpentry, woodcarving, baking and pastrymaking, and cheesemaking.
Farming has been a traditional occupation for centuries, although it became less dominant in the 20th century with the advent of tourism. Grazing and pasture land are limited because of the steep and rocky topography of the Alps. In midJun
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e cows are moved to the highest pastures close to the snowline, where they are watched by herdsmen who stay in the high altitudes often living in stone huts or wooden barns during the summers. Villagers celebrate the day the cows are herded up to the pastures and again when they return in midSeptember. The Almabtrieb, Alpabzug, Alpabfahrt, Dsalpes "coming down from the alps" is celebrated by decorating the cows with garlands and enormous cowbells while the farmers dress in traditional costumes.
Cheesemaking is an ancient tradition in most Alpine countries. A wheel of cheese from the Emmental in Switzerland can weigh up to , and the Beaufort in Savoy can weigh up to . Owners of the cows traditionally receive from the cheesemakers a portion in relation to the proportion of the cows' milk from the summer months in the high alps. Haymaking is an important farming activity in mountain villages that has become somewhat mechanized in recent years, although the slopes are so steep that scythes are usually necessary
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to cut the grass. Hay is normally brought in twice a year, often also on festival days.
In the high villages, people live in homes built according to medieval designs that withstand cold winters. The kitchen is separated from the living area called the stube, the area of the home heated by a stove, and secondfloor bedrooms benefit from rising heat. The typical Swiss chalet originated in the Bernese Oberland. Chalets often face south or downhill, and are built of solid wood, with a steeply gabled roof to allow accumulated snow to slide off easily. Stairs leading to upper levels are sometimes built on the outside, and balconies are sometimes enclosed.
Food is passed from the kitchen to the stube, where the dining room table is placed. Some meals are communal, such as fondue, where a pot is set in the middle of the table for each person to dip into. Other meals are still served in a traditional manner on carved wooden plates. Furniture has been traditionally elaborately carved and in many Alpine countries car
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pentry skills are passed from generation to generation.
Roofs are traditionally constructed from Alpine rocks such as pieces of schist, gneiss or slate. Such chalets are typically found in the higher parts of the valleys, as in the Maurienne valley in Savoy, where the amount of snow during the cold months is important. The inclination of the roof cannot exceed 40, allowing the snow to stay on top, thereby functioning as insulation from the cold. In the lower areas where the forests are widespread, wooden tiles are traditionally used. Commonly made of Norway spruce, they are called "tavaillon".
In the Germanspeaking parts of the Alps Austria, Bavaria, South Tyrol, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, there is a strong tradition of Alpine folk culture. Old traditions are carefully maintained among inhabitants of Alpine areas, even though this is seldom obvious to the visitor many people are members of cultural associations where the Alpine folk culture is cultivated. At cultural events, traditional folk costume in
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German Tracht is expected typically lederhosen for men and dirndls for women. Visitors can get a glimpse of the rich customs of the Alps at public Volksfeste. Even when large events feature only a little folk culture, all participants take part with gusto. Good opportunities to see local people celebrating the traditional culture occur at the many fairs, wine festivals and firefighting festivals which fill weekends in the countryside from spring to autumn. Alpine festivals vary from country to country. Frequently they include music e.g. the playing of Alpenhorns, dance e.g. Schuhplattler, sports e.g. wrestling marches and archery, as well as traditions with pagan roots such as the lighting of fires on Walpurgis Night and Saint John's Eve. Many areas celebrate Fastnacht in the weeks before Lent. Folk costume also continues to be worn for most weddings and festivals.
Tourism
The Alps are one of the more popular tourist destinations in the world with many resorts such Oberstdorf, in Bavaria, Saalbach in Aust
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ria, Davos in Switzerland, Chamonix in France, and Cortina d'Ampezzo in Italy recording more than a million annual visitors. With over 120 million visitors a year, tourism is integral to the Alpine economy with much it coming from winter sports, although summer visitors are also an important component.
The tourism industry began in the early 19th century when foreigners visited the Alps, travelled to the bases of the mountains to enjoy the scenery, and stayed at the sparesorts. Large hotels were built during the Belle poque; cograilways, built early in the 20th century, brought tourists to everhigher elevations, with the Jungfraubahn terminating at the Jungfraujoch, well above the eternal snowline, after going through a tunnel in Eiger. During this period winter sports were slowly introduced in 1882 the first figure skating championship was held in St. Moritz, and downhill skiing became a popular sport with English visitors early in the 20th century, as the first skilift was installed in 1908 above Grindelwa
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ld.
In the first half of the 20th century the Olympic Winter Games were held three times in Alpine venues the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France; the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland; and the 1936 Winter Olympics in GarmischPartenkirchen, Germany. During World War II the winter games were cancelled but after that time the Winter Games have been held in St. Moritz 1948, Cortina d'Ampezzo 1956, Innsbruck, Austria 1964 and 1976, Grenoble, France, 1968, Albertville, France, 1992, and Torino 2006. In 1930, the Lauberhorn Rennen Lauberhorn Race, was run for the first time on the Lauberhorn above Wengen; the equally demanding Hahnenkamm was first run in the same year in Kitzbhl, Austria. Both races continue to be held each January on successive weekends. The Lauberhorn is the more strenuous downhill race at and poses danger to racers who reach within seconds of leaving the start gate.
During the postWorld War I period, skilifts were built in Swiss and Austrian towns to accommodate winter vis
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itors, but summer tourism continued to be important; by the mid20th century the popularity of downhill skiing increased greatly as it became more accessible and in the 1970s several new villages were built in France devoted almost exclusively to skiing, such as Les Menuires. Until this point, Austria and Switzerland had been the traditional and more popular destinations for winter sports, but by the end of the 20th century and into the early 21st century, France, Italy and the Tyrol began to see increases in winter visitors. From 1980 to the present, skilifts have been modernized and snowmaking machines installed at many resorts, leading to concerns regarding the loss of traditional Alpine culture and questions regarding sustainable development. Probably due to climate change, the number of ski resorts and piste kilometres has declined since 2015
Avalanchesnowslide
17th century FrenchItalian border avalanche in the 17th century about 2500 people were killed by an avalanche in a village on the FrenchItalian
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border.
19th century Zermatt avalanche in the 19th century, 120 homes in a village near Zermatt were destroyed by an avalanche.
December 13, 1916 Marmoladamountainavalanche
19501951 winterofterror avalanches
February 10, 1970 Val d'Isre avalanche
February 9, 1999 Montroc avalanche
February 21, 1999 Evolne avalanche
February 23, 1999 Galtr avalanche the deadliest avalanche in the Alps in 40 years.
July 2014 MontBlanc avalanche
January 13, 2016 LesDeuxAlpes avalanche
January 18, 2016 Valfrjus avalanche
Transportation
The region is serviced by of roads used by six million vehicles per year. Train travel is well established in the Alps, with, for instance of track for every in a country such as Switzerland. Most of Europe's highest railways are located there. In 2007, the new Ltschberg Base Tunnel was opened, which circumvents the 100 years older Ltschberg Tunnel. With the opening of the Gotthard Base Tunnel on June 1, 2016, it bypasses the Gotthard Tunnel built in the 19th century and realize
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s the first flat route through the Alps.
Some high mountain villages are carfree either because of inaccessibility or by choice. Wengen, and Zermatt in Switzerland are accessible only by cable car or cograil trains. Avoriaz in France, is carfree, with other Alpine villages considering becoming carfree zones or limiting the number of cars for reasons of sustainability of the fragile Alpine terrain.
The lower regions and larger towns of the Alps are wellserved by motorways and main roads, but higher mountain passes and byroads, which are amongst the highest in Europe, can be treacherous even in summer due to steep slopes. Many passes are closed in winter. A number of airports around the Alps and some within, as well as longdistance rail links from all neighbouring countries, afford large numbers of travellers easy access.
See also
Notes
References
Works cited
Alpine Convention. 2010. The Alps People and pressures in the mountains, the facts at a glance
Allaby, Michael et al. The Encyclopedia of Earth.
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2008. Berkeley University of California Press.
Beattie, Andrew. 2006. The Alps A Cultural History. New York Oxford University Press.
Benniston, Martin, et al. 2011. "Impact of Climatic Change on Water and Natural Hazards in the Alps". Environmental Science and Policy. Volume 30. 19
Cebon, Peter, et al. 1998. Views from the Alps Regional Perspectives on Climate Change. Cambridge MA MIT Press.
Chatr, Baptiste, et al. 2010. The Alps People and Pressures in the Mountains, the Facts at a Glance. Permanent Secretariat of the Alpine Convention alpconv.org. Retrieved August 4, 2012.
De Graciansky, PierreCharles et al. 2011. The Western Alps, From Rift to Passive Margin to Orogenic Belt. Amsterdam Elsevier.
Feuer, A.B. 2006. Packs On! Memoirs of the 10th Mountain Division in World War II. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania Stackpole Books.
Fleming, Fergus. 2000. Killing Dragons The Conquest of the Alps. New York Grove.
Gerrard, AJ. 1990 Mountain Environments An Examination of the Physical Geography of Mountai
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ns. Boston MIT Press.
Halbrook, Stephen P. 1998. Target Switzerland Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II. Rockville Center, NY Sarpedon.
Halbrook, Stephen P. 2006. The Swiss and the Nazis How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Havertown, PA Casemate.
Hudson, Simon. 2000. Snow Business A Study of the International Ski Industry. New York Cengage
Krner, Christian. 2003. Alpine Plant Life. New York Springer Verlag.
Lancel, Serge. 1999. Hannibal. Oxford Blackwell.
Mitchell, Arthur H. 2007. Hitler's Mountain. Jefferson, NC McFarland.
Prevas, John. 2001. Hannibal Crosses The Alps The Invasion Of Italy And The Punic Wars. Cambridge, MA Da Capo Press.
Reynolds, Kev. 2012 The Swiss Alps. Cicerone Press.
Roth, Philipe. 2007. Minerals first Discovered in Switzerland. Lausanne, CH Museum of Geology.
Schmid, Stefan M. 2004. "Regional tectonics from the Rhine graben to the Po plain, a summary of the tectonic evolution of the Alps and their forelands". Basel GeologischPalon
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tologisches Institut
Sharp, Hilary. 2002. Trekking and Climbing in the Western Alps. London New Holland.
Shoumatoff, Nicholas and Nina. 2001. The Alps Europe's Mountain Heart. Ann Arbor, MI University of Michigan Press.
Viazzo, Pier Paolo. 1980. Upland Communities Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
External links
17, 2005 Satellite photo of the Alps, taken on August 31, 2005, by MODIS aboard Terra
Official website of the Alpine Space Programme This EU cofunded programme cofinances transnational projects in the Alpine region
Geography of Central Europe
Geography of Southern Europe
Geography of Western Europe
Mountain ranges of Austria
Mountain ranges of France
Mountain ranges of Germany
Mountain ranges of Italy
Mountain ranges of Liechtenstein
Mountain ranges of Monaco
Mountain ranges of Slovenia
Mountain ranges of Switzerland
Physiographic provinces
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Albert Camus , ; ; 7 November 1913 4 January 1960 was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the secondyoungest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
Camus was born in French Algeria to Pieds Noirs parents. He spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. He was in Paris when the Germans invaded France during World War II in 1940. Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editorinchief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper. After the war, he was a celebrity figure and gave many lectures around the world. He married twice but had many extramarital affairs. Camus was politically active; he was part of the left that opposed the Soviet Union because of its totalitarianism. Camus was a moralist and leaned towards anarchosyndicalism. He was part of many organisations seeking
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European integration. During the Algerian War 19541962, he kept a neutral stance, advocating for a multicultural and pluralistic Algeria, a position that caused controversy and was rejected by most parties.
Philosophically, Camus's views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He is also considered to be an existentialist, even though he firmly rejected the term throughout his lifetime.
Life
Early years and education
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in a workingclass neighbourhood in Mondovi presentday Dran, in French Algeria. His mother, Catherine Hlne Camus ne Sints, was French with Balearic Spanish ancestry. His father, Lucien Camus, a poor French agricultural worker, died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I. Camus never knew him. Camus, his mother and other relatives lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. He was a secondgeneration French in Algeria, a French territory from 1830 until 1962. H
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is paternal grandfather, along with many others of his generation, had moved to Algeria for a better life during the first decades of the 19th century. Hence, he was called a slang term for French who were born in Algeriaand his identity and his poor background had a substantial effect on his later life. Nevertheless, Camus was a French citizen and enjoyed more rights than Arab and Berber Algerians under indignat. During his childhood, Camus developed a love for football and swimming.
Under the influence of his teacher Louis Germain, Camus gained a scholarship in 1924 to continue his studies at a prestigious lyceum secondary school near Algiers. In 1930, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Because it is a transmitted disease, he moved out of his home and stayed with his uncle Gustave Acault, a butcher, who influenced the young Camus. It was at that time that Camus turned to philosophy, with the mentoring of his philosophy teacher Jean Grenier. He was impressed by ancient Greek philosophers and Friedrich Niet
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zsche. During that time, he was only able to study parttime. To earn money, he took odd jobs as a private tutor, car parts clerk, and assistant at the Meteorological Institute.
In 1933, Camus enrolled at the University of Algiers and completed his licence de philosophie BA in 1936; after presenting his thesis on Plotinus. Camus developed an interest in early Christian philosophers, but Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer had paved the way towards pessimism and atheism. Camus also studied novelistphilosophers such as Stendhal, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Franz Kafka. In 1933, he also met Simone Hi, then a partner of a friend of Camus, who would become his first wife.
Camus played goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger junior team from 1928 to 1930. The sense of team spirit, fraternity, and common purpose appealed to Camus enormously. In match reports, he was often praised for playing with passion and courage. Any football ambitions disappeared when he contracted tuberculosis at the age of
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17. Camus drew parallels among football, human existence, morality, and personal identity. For him, the simplistic morality of football contradicted the complicated morality imposed by authorities such as the state and Church.
Formative years
In 1934, aged 20, Camus was in a relationship with Simone Hi. Simone suffered from an addiction to morphine, a drug she used to ease her menstrual pains. His uncle Gustave did not approve of the relationship, but Camus married Hi to help her fight her addiction. He subsequently discovered she was in a relationship with her doctor at the same time and the couple later divorced.
Camus joined the French Communist Party PCF in early 1935. He saw it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria," even though he was not a Marxist. He explained "We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities." Camus left the PCF a year later. In 1936, the independenceminded Algerian Communist Party P
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CA was founded, and Camus joined it after his mentor Grenier advised him to do so. Camus's main role within the PCA was to organise the Thtre du Travail "Workers' Theatre". Camus was also close to the Parti du Peuple Algrien Algerian People's Party PPA, which was a moderate anticolonialistnationalist party. As tensions in the interwar period escalated, the Stalinist PCA and PPA broke ties. Camus was expelled from the PCA for refusing to toe the party line. This series of events sharpened his belief in human dignity. Camus's mistrust of bureaucracies that aimed for efficiency instead of justice grew. He continued his involvement with theatre and renamed his group Thtre de l'Equipe "Theatre of the Team". Some of his scripts were the basis for his later novels.
In 1938, Camus began working for the leftist newspaper Alger rpublicain founded by Pascal Pia as he had strong antifascist feelings, and the rise of fascist regimes in Europe was worrying him. By then, Camus had developed strong feelings against authorit
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ative colonialism as he witnessed the harsh treatment of the Arabs and Berbers by French authorities. Alger rpublicain was banned in 1940 and Camus flew to Paris to take a new job at ParisSoir as editorinchief. In Paris, he almost completed his "first cycle" of works dealing with the absurd and the meaninglessthe novel L'tranger The Outsider UK, or The Stranger US, the philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe The Myth of Sisyphus and the play Caligula. Each cycle consisted of a novel, an essay and a theatrical play.
World War II, Resistance and Combat
Soon after Camus moved to Paris, the outbreak of World War II began to affect France. Camus volunteered to join the army but was not accepted because he had suffered from tuberculosis. As the Germans were marching towards Paris, Camus fled. He was laid off from ParisSoir and ended up in Lyon, where he married pianist and mathematician Francine Faure on 3 December 1940. Camus and Faure moved back to Algeria Oran where he taught in primary schools. Because of his
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tuberculosis, he moved to the French Alps on medical advice. There he began writing his second cycle of works, this time dealing with revolta novel La Peste The Plague and a play Le Malentendu The Misunderstanding. By 1943 he was known because of his earlier work. He returned to Paris where he met and became friends with JeanPaul Sartre. He also became part of a circle of intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir, Andr Breton, and others. Among them was the actress Mara Casares, who would later have an affair with Camus.
Camus took an active role in the underground resistance movement against the Germans during the French Occupation. Upon his arrival in Paris, he started working as a journalist and editor of the banned newspaper Combat. He continued writing for the paper after the liberation of France. Camus used a pseudonym for his Combat articles and used false ID cards to avoid being captured. During that period he composed four Lettres un Ami Allemand Letters to a German Friend, explaining why resista
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nce was necessary.
PostWorld War II
After the War, Camus lived in Paris with Faure, who gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean in 1945. Camus was now a celebrated writer known for his role in the Resistance. He gave lectures at various universities in the United States and Latin America during two separate trips. He also visited Algeria once more, only to leave disappointed by the continued oppressive colonial policies, which he had warned about many times. During this period he completed the second cycle of his work, with the essay L'Homme rvolt The Rebel. Camus attacked totalitarian communism while advocating libertarian socialism and anarchosyndicalism. Upsetting many of his colleagues and contemporaries in France with his rejection of communism, the book brought about the final split with Sartre. His relations with the Marxist Left deteriorated further during the Algerian War.
Camus was a strong supporter of European integration in various marginal organisations working towards that end. In 1944, he f
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ounded the Comit franais pour la fderation europenneCFFE French Committee for the European Federationdeclaring that Europe "can only evolve along the path of economic progress, democracy, and peace if the nationstates become a federation." In 194748, he founded the Groupes de Liaison Internationale GLI a trade union movement in the context of revolutionary syndicalism syndicalisme rvolutionnaire. His main aim was to express the positive side of surrealism and existentialism, rejecting the negativity and the nihilism of Andr Breton. Camus also raised his voice against the Soviet intervention in Hungary and the totalitarian tendencies of Franco's regime in Spain.
Camus had numerous affairs, particularly an irregular and eventually public affair with the Spanishborn actress Mara Casares, with whom he had extensive correspondence. Faure did not take this affair lightly. She had a mental breakdown and needed hospitalisation in the early 1950s. Camus, who felt guilty, withdrew from public life and was slightly dep
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ressed for some time.
In 1957, Camus received the news that he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This came as a shock to him. He was anticipating Andr Malraux would win the prestigious award. At age 44, he was the secondyoungest recipient of the prize, after Rudyard Kipling, who was 42. After this he began working on his autobiography Le Premier Homme The First Man in an attempt to examine "moral learning". He also turned to the theatre once more. Financed by the money he received with his Nobel Prize, he adapted and directed for the stage Dostoyevsky's novel Demons. The play opened in January 1959 at the Antoine Theatre in Paris and was a critical success.
During these years, he published posthumously the works of the philosopher Simone Weil, in the series "Espoir" "Hope" which he had founded for ditions Gallimard. Weil had great influence on his philosophy, since he saw her writings as an "antidote" to nihilism. Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times".
Death
Ca
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mus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. He had spent the New Year's holiday of 1960 at his house in Lourmarin, Vaucluse with his family, and his publisher Michel Gallimard of ditions Gallimard, along with Gallimard's wife, Janine, and daughter. Camus's wife and children went back to Paris by train on 2 January, but Camus decided to return in Gallimard's luxurious Facel Vega HK500. The car crashed into a plane tree on a long straight stretch of the Route nationale 5 now the RN 6 or D606. Camus, who was in the passenger seat, died instantly. Gallimard died a few days later, although his wife and daughter were unharmed. There has been speculation that Camus was assassinated by the KGB because of his criticism of Soviet abuses.
144 pages of a handwritten manuscript entitled Le premier Homme The First Man were found in the wreckage. Camus had predicted that this unfinished novel based on his childhood in Algeria would be his f
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inest work. Camus was buried in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Vaucluse, France, where he had lived. His friend Sartre read a eulogy, paying tribute to Camus's heroic "stubborn humanism". William Faulkner wrote his obituary, saying, "When the door shut for him he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death, is hoping to do I was here."
Literary career
Camus's first publication was a play called Rvolte dans les Asturies Revolt in the Asturias written with three friends in May 1936. The subject was the 1934 revolt by Spanish miners that was brutally suppressed by the Spanish government resulting in 1,500 to 2,000 deaths. In May 1937 he wrote his first book, L'Envers et l'Endroit Betwixt and Between, also translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side. Both were published by Edmond Charlot's small publishing house.
Camus separated his work into three cycles. Each cycle consisted of a novel, an essay, and a pla
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y. The first was the cycle of the absurd consisting of L'tranger, Le Mythe de Sysiphe, and Caligula. The second was the cycle of the revolt which included La Peste The Plague, L'Homme rvolt The Rebel, and Les Justes The Just Assassins. The third, the cycle of the love, consisted of Nemesis. Each cycle was an examination of a theme with the use of a pagan myth and including biblical motifs.
The books in the first cycle were published between 1942 and 1944, but the theme was conceived earlier, at least as far back as 1936. With this cycle, Camus aims to pose a question on the human condition, discuss the world as an absurd place, and warn humanity of the consequences of totalitarianism.
Camus began his work on the second cycle while he was in Algeria, in the last months of 1942, just as the Germans were reaching North Africa. In the second cycle, Camus used Prometheus, who is depicted as a revolutionary humanist, to highlight the nuances between revolution and rebellion. He analyses various aspects of rebelli
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on, its metaphysics, its connection to politics, and examines it under the lens of modernity, of historicity and the absence of a God.
After receiving the Nobel Prize, Camus gathered, clarified, and published his pacifist leaning views at Actuelles III Chronique algrienne 19391958 Algerian Chronicles. He then decided to distance himself from the Algerian War as he found the mental burden too heavy. He turned to theatre and the third cycle which was about love and the goddess Nemesis.
Two of Camus's works were published posthumously. The first entitled La mort heureuse A Happy Death 1970, features a character named Patrice Mersault, comparable to The Strangers Meursault. There is scholarly debate about the relationship between the two books. The second was an unfinished novel, Le Premier homme The First Man 1995, which Camus was writing before he died. It was an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria and its publication in 1994 sparked a widespread reconsideration of Camus's allegedly unrepenta
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nt colonialism.
Political stance
Camus was a moralist; he claimed morality should guide politics. While he did not deny that morals change over time, he rejected the classical Marxist view that historical material relations define morality.
Camus was also strongly critical of MarxismLeninism, especially in the case of the Soviet Union, which he considered totalitarian. Camus rebuked those sympathetic to the Soviet model and their "decision to call total servitude freedom". A proponent of libertarian socialism, he claimed the USSR was not socialist, and the United States was not liberal. His critique of the USSR caused him to clash with others on the political left, most notably with his onagain, offagain friend JeanPaul Sartre.
Active in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Camus wrote for and edited the famous Resistance journal Combat. Of the French collaboration with the German occupiers, he wrote "Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judg
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ing the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people." After France's liberation, Camus remarked, "This country does not need a Talleyrand, but a SaintJust." The reality of the postwar tribunals soon changed his mind Camus publicly reversed himself and became a lifelong opponent of capital punishment.
Camus leaned towards anarchism, a tendency that intensified in the 1950s, when he came to believe that the Soviet model was morally bankrupt. Camus was firmly against any kind of exploitation, authority, property, the State, and centralization. Philosophy professor David Sherman considers Camus an anarchosyndicalist. Graeme Nicholson considers Camus an existentialist anarchist.
The anarchist Andr Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting of the Cercle des tudiants Anarchistes "Anarchist Student Circle" in 1948 as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought. Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire The Libertarian, La Rvolution proltarienne The Proletarian R
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evolution, and Solidaridad Obrera "Workers' Solidarity", the organ of the anarchosyndicalist Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo CNT "National Confederation of Labor".
Camus kept a neutral stance during the Algerian Revolution 195462. While he was against the violence of the National Liberation Front FLN he acknowledged the injustice and brutalities imposed by colonialist France. He was supportive of Pierre Mends' Unified Socialist Party PSU and its approach to the crisis; Mendes advocated reconciliation. Camus also supported a likeminded Algerian militant, Aziz Kessous. Camus traveled to Algeria to negotiate a truce between the two belligerents but was met with distrust by all parties. In one famous and often misquoted incident, Camus confronted an Algerian critic during his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, rejecting the false equivalence of justice with revolutionary terrorism People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is jus
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tice, then I prefer my mother. Camus' critics have labelled the response as reactionary and a result of a colonialist attitude.
He was sharply critical of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1950s, Camus devoted his efforts to human rights. In 1952, he resigned from his work for UNESCO when the UN accepted Spain, under the leadership of the caudillo General Francisco Franco, as a member. Camus maintained his pacifism and resisted capital punishment anywhere in the world. He wrote an essay against capital punishment in collaboration with Arthur Koestler, the writer, intellectual, and founder of the League Against Capital Punishment entitled Rflexions sur la peine capitale Reflections on capital punishment, published by CalmannLevy in 1957.
Role in Algeria
Born in Algeria to French parents, Camus was familiar with the institutional racism of France against Arabs and Berbers, but he was not part of a rich elite. He lived in very poor conditions as a child bu
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t was a citizen of France and as such was entitled to citizens' rights; members of the country's Arab and Berber majority were not.
Camus was a vocal advocate of the "new Mediterranean Culture". This was his vision of embracing the multiethnicity of the Algerian people, in opposition to "Latiny", a popular profascist and antisemitic ideology among other PiedsNoirsor French or Europeans born in Algeria. For Camus, this vision encapsulated the Hellenic humanism which survived among ordinary people around the Mediterranean Sea. His 1938 address on "The New Mediterranean Culture" represents Camus's most systematic statement of his views at this time. Camus also supported the BlumViollette proposal to grant Algerians full French citizenship in a manifesto with arguments defending this assimilative proposal on radical egalitarian grounds. In 1939, Camus wrote a stinging series of articles for the Alger rpublicain on the atrocious living conditions of the inhabitants of the Kabylie highlands. He advocated for econ
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omic, educational and political reforms as a matter of emergency.
In 1945, following the Stif and Guelma massacre after Arab revolts against French mistreatment, Camus was one of only a few mainland journalists to visit the colony. He wrote a series of articles reporting on conditions, and advocating for French reforms and concessions to the demands of the Algerian people.
When the Algerian War began in 1954, Camus was confronted with a moral dilemma. He identified with the PiedsNoirs such as his own parents and defended the French government's actions against the revolt. He argued the Algerian uprising was an integral part of the "new Arab imperialism" led by Egypt, and an "antiWestern" offensive orchestrated by Russia to "encircle Europe" and "isolate the United States". Although favoring greater Algerian autonomy or even federation, though not fullscale independence, he believed the PiedsNoirs and Arabs could coexist. During the war, he advocated a civil truce that would spare the civilians. It was rejec
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ted by both sides who regarded it as foolish. Behind the scenes, he began working for imprisoned Algerians who faced the death penalty. His position drew much criticism from the left and later postcolonial literary critics, such as Edward Said, who were opposed to European imperialism, and charged that Camus's novels and short stories are plagued with colonial depictions or conscious erasures of Algeria's Arab population. In their eyes, Camus was no longer the defender of the oppressed.
Camus once confided that the troubles in Algeria "affected him as others feel pain in their lungs."
Philosophy
Existentialism
Even though Camus is mostly connected to absurdism, he is routinely categorized as an existentialist, a term he rejected on several occasions.
Camus himself said his philosophical origins lay in ancient Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, and 17thcentury moralists whereas existentialism arises from 19th and early 20thcentury philosophy such as Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Heidegger. He also said his
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work, The Myth of Sisyphus, was a criticism of various aspects of existentialism. Camus was rejecting existentialism as a philosophy, but his critique was mostly focused on Sartrean existentialism, and to a lesser extent on religious existentialism. He thought that the importance of history held by Marx and Sartre was incompatible with his belief in human freedom. David Sherman and others also suggest the rivalry between Sartre and Camus also played a part in his rejection of existentialism. David Simpson argues further that his humanism and belief in human nature set him apart from the existentialist doctrine that existence precedes essence.
On the other hand, Camus focused most of his philosophy around existential questions. The absurdity of life, the inevitable ending death is highlighted in his acts. His belief was that the absurdlife being void of meaning, or man's inability to know that meaning if it were to existwas something that man should embrace. His antiChristianity, his commitment to individual
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moral freedom and responsibility are only a few of the similarities with other existential writers. More importantly, Camus addressed one of the fundamental questions of existentialism the problem of suicide. He wrote "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide." Camus viewed the question of suicide as arising naturally as a solution to the absurdity of life.
Absurdism
Many existentialist writers have addressed the Absurd, each with their own interpretation of what it is and what makes it important. Kierkegaard explains that the absurdity of religious truths prevents us from reaching God rationally. Sartre recognizes the absurdity of individual experience. Camus's thoughts on the Absurd begin with his first cycle of books and the literary essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, his major work on the subject. In 1942, he published the story of a man living an absurd life in L'tranger. He also wrote a play about the Roman emperor Caligula, pursuing an absurd logic, wh
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ich was not performed until 1945. His early thoughts appeared in his first collection of essays, L'Envers et l'endroit Betwixt and Between in 1937. Absurd themes were expressed with more sophistication in his second collection of essays, Noces Nuptials, in 1938 and Betwixt and Between. In these essays, Camus reflects on the experience of the Absurd. Aspects of the notion of the Absurd can be found in The Plague.
Camus follows Sartre's definition of the Absurd "That which is meaningless. Thus man's existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification". The Absurd is created because man, who is placed in an unintelligent universe, realises that human values are not founded on a solid external component; or as Camus himself explains, the Absurd is the result of the "confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." Even though absurdity is inescapable, Camus does not drift towards nihilism. But the realization of absurdity leads to the question Why should someon
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e continue to live? Suicide is an option that Camus firmly dismisses as the renunciation of human values and freedom. Rather, he proposes we accept that absurdity is a part of our lives and live with it.
The turning point in Camus's attitude to the Absurd occurs in a collection of four letters to an anonymous German friend, written between July 1943 and July 1944. The first was published in the Revue Libre in 1943, the second in the Cahiers de Libration in 1944, and the third in the newspaper Liberts, in 1945. The four letters were published as Lettres un ami allemand Letters to a German Friend in 1945, and were included in the collection Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.
Camus regretted the continued reference to himself as a "philosopher of the absurd". He showed less interest in the Absurd shortly after publishing Le Mythe de Sisyphe. To distinguish his ideas, scholars sometimes refer to the Paradox of the Absurd, when referring to "Camus's Absurd".
Revolt
Camus is known for articulating the case for
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revolting against any kind of oppression, injustice, or whatever disrespects the human condition. He is cautious enough, however, to set the limits on the rebellion. L'Homme rvolt The Rebel explains in detail his thoughts on the issue. There, he builds upon the absurd described in The Myth of Sisyphus but goes further. In the introduction, where he examines the metaphysics of rebellion, he concludes with the phrase "I revolt, therefore we exist" implying the recognition of a common human condition. Camus also delineates the difference between revolution and rebellion and notices that history has shown that the rebel's revolution might easily end up as an oppressive regime; he therefore places importance on the morals accompanying the revolution. Camus poses a crucial question Is it possible for humans to act in an ethical and meaningful manner, in a silent universe? According to him the answer is yes, as the experience and awareness of the Absurd creates the moral values and also sets the limits of our action
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s. Camus separates the modern form of rebellion into two modes. First, there is the metaphysical rebellion, which is "the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation." The other mode, historical rebellion, is the attempt to materialize the abstract spirit of metaphysical rebellion and change the world. In this attempt, the rebel must balance between the evil of the world and the intrinsic evil which every revolt carries, and not cause any unjustifiable suffering.
Legacy
Camus's novels and philosophical essays are still influential. After his death, interest in Camus followed the rise and diminution of the New Left. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, interest in his alternative road to communism resurfaced. He is remembered for his skeptical humanism and his support for political tolerance, dialogue, and civil rights.
Although Camus has been linked to antiSoviet communism, reaching as far as anarchosyndicalism, some neoliberals have tried to associate him w
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ith their policies; for instance, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that his remains be moved to the Panthon, an idea that angered many on the Left.
Tributes
In Tipasa Algeria, inside the Roman ruins, facing the sea and Mount Chenoua, a stele was erected in 1961 in honor of Albert Camus with this phrase in French extracted from his work Noces Tipasa I understand here what is called glory the right to love beyond measure " Je comprends ici ce qu'on appelle gloire le droit d'aimer sans mesure. .
The French Post published a stamp with his effigy on June 26, 1967.
Works
The works of Albert Camus include
Novels
A Happy Death La Mort heureuse written 193638, published 1971
The Stranger L'tranger, often translated as The Outsider. An alternate meaning of "l'tranger" is "foreigner" 1942
The Plague La Peste 1947
The Fall La Chute 1956
The First Man Le premier homme incomplete, published 1994
Short stories
Exile and the Kingdom L'exil et le royaume collection, 1957, containing the followin
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g short stories
"The Adulterous Woman" La Femme adultre
"The Renegade or a Confused Spirit" Le Rengat ou un esprit confus
"The Silent Men" Les Muets
"The Guest" L'Hte
"Jonas, or the Artist at Work" Jonas, ou l'artiste au travail
"The Growing Stone" La Pierre qui pousse
Academic theses
Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism Mtaphysique chrtienne et noplatonisme 1935 the thesis that enabled Camus to teach in secondary schools in France
Nonfiction books
Betwixt and Between L'envers et l'endroit, also translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side collection, 1937
Nuptials Noces 1938
The Myth of Sisyphus Le Mythe de Sisyphe 1942
The Rebel L'Homme rvolt 1951
Algerian Chronicles Chroniques algriennes 1958, first English translation published 2013
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death collection, 1961
Notebooks 19351942 Carnets, mai 1935 fevrier 1942 1962
Notebooks 19421951 Carnets II janvier 1942mars 1951 1965
Lyrical and Critical Essays collection, 1968
American Journals Journaux de voyage 1978
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Notebooks 19511959 2008. Published as Carnets Tome III Mars 1951 December 1959 1989
Correspondence 19441959 The correspondence of Albert Camus and Mara Casares, with a preface by his daughter, Catherine Camus 2017
Plays
Caligula performed 1945, written 1938
The Misunderstanding Le Malentendu 1944
The State of Siege L'tat de Sige 1948
The Just Assassins Les Justes 1949
Requiem for a Nun Requiem pour une nonne, adapted from William Faulkner's novel by the same name 1956
The Possessed Les Possds, adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Demons 1959
Essays
The Crisis of Man Lecture at Columbia University 28 March 1946
Neither Victims nor Executioners Series of essays in Combat 1946
Why Spain? Essay for the theatrical play L'Etat de Sige 1948
Summer L't 1954
Reflections on the Guillotine Rflexions sur la guillotine Extended essay, 1957
Create Dangerously Essay on Realism and Artistic Creation, lecture at the University of Uppsala in Sweden 1957
References
Sources
Further reading
Selected biograp
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hies
External links
Albert Camus. Selective and Cumulative Bibliography
GayCrosier Camus collection at University of Florida Library
Albert Camus Society UK
1913 births
1960 deaths
20thcentury atheists
20thcentury French dramatists and playwrights
20thcentury French essayists
20thcentury French male writers
20thcentury French novelists
20thcentury French philosophers
20thcentury French journalists
20thcentury short story writers
African philosophers
Anarchocommunists
Anarchopacifists
Anarchosyndicalists
AntiStalinist left
Communist members of the French Resistance
Continental philosophers
Existentialists
French anarchists
French anticapitalists
French antideath penalty activists
French antifascists
French atheists
French Communist Party members
People of French Algeria
French humanists
French male essayists
French Marxists
French Nobel laureates
French pacifists
French people of Spanish descent
French socialists
Individualist anarchists
Leftlibertarians
Libertarian Marxists
Libertarian socialists
Lg
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ion d'honneur refusals
Modernist writers
Nobel laureates in Literature
People from Dran
PiedsNoirs
Road incident deaths in France
University of Algiers alumni
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, ne Miller; 15 September 1890 12 January 1976 was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longestrunning play, The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame DBE for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the bestselling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Christie was born into a wealthy uppermiddleclass family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely homeschooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had
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one child before divorcing in 1928. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons which featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on digs in the Middle East and used her firsthand knowledge of his profession in her fiction.
According to Index Translationum, she remains the mosttranslated individual author. Her novel And Then There Were None is one of the topselling books of all time, with approximately 100 million copies sold. Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for the longest initial run. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End of London on 25 November 1952, and by September 2018 there had been more than 27,500 performances. The play was closed down in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic and reopened in May 2021.
In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America'
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s Grand Master Award. Later that year, Witness for the Prosecution received an Edgar Award for best play. In 2013, she was voted the best crime writer and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the best crime novel ever by 600 professional novelists of the Crime Writers' Association. In September 2015, And Then There Were None was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate. Most of Christie's books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games, and graphic novels. More than 30 feature films are based on her work.
Life and career
Childhood and adolescence 18901907
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890, into a wealthy uppermiddleclass family in Torquay, Devon. She was the youngest of three children born to Frederick Alvah Miller, "a gentleman of substance", and his wife Clarissa Margaret "Clara" Miller ne Boehmer.
Christie's mother Clara was born in Dublin in 1854 to British Army officer Frederick Boehmer and his wife Mary Ann Boehmer
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ne West. Boehmer died in Jersey in 1863, leaving his widow to raise Clara and her brothers on a meagre income. Two weeks after Boehmer's death, Mary's sister Margaret West married widowed dry goods merchant Nathaniel Frary Miller, a US citizen. To assist Mary financially, they agreed to foster nineyearold Clara; the family settled in Timperley, Cheshire. Margaret and Nathaniel had no children together, but Nathaniel had a 17yearold son, Fred Miller, from his previous marriage. Fred was born in New York City and travelled extensively after leaving his Swiss boarding school. He and Clara were married in London in 1878. Their first child, Margaret Frary "Madge", was born in Torquay in 1879. The second, Louis Montant "Monty", was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1880, while the family was on an extended visit to the United States.
When Fred's father died in 1869, he left Clara 2,000 approximately ; in 1881 they used this to buy the leasehold of a villa in Torquay named Ashfield. It was here that their third a
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nd last child, Agatha, was born in 1890. She described her childhood as "very happy". The Millers lived mainly in Devon but often visited her stepgrandmothergreataunt Margaret Miller in Ealing and maternal grandmother Mary Boehmer in Bayswater. A year was spent abroad with her family, in the French Pyrenees, Paris, Dinard, and Guernsey. Because her siblings were so much older, and there were few children in their neighbourhood, Christie spent much of her time playing alone with her pets and imaginary companions. She eventually made friends with other girls in Torquay, noting that "one of the highlights of my existence" was her appearance with them in a youth production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard, in which she played the hero, Colonel Fairfax.
According to Christie, Clara believed she should not learn to read until she was eight; thanks to her curiosity, she was reading by age four. Her sister had been sent to a boarding school, but their mother insisted that Christie receive a home edu
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cation. As a result, her parents and sister supervised her studies in reading, writing, and basic arithmetic, a subject she particularly enjoyed. They also taught her music, and she learned to play the piano and the mandolin.
Christie was a voracious reader from an early age. Among her earliest memories were reading children's books by Mrs Molesworth and Edith Nesbit. When a little older, she moved on to the surreal verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. As an adolescent, she enjoyed works by Anthony Hope, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas. In April 1901, aged 10, she wrote her first poem, "The Cow Slip".
By 1901, her father's health had deteriorated, because of what he believed were heart problems. Fred died in November 1901 from pneumonia and chronic kidney disease. Christie later said that her father's death when she was 11 marked the end of her childhood.
The family's financial situation had by this time worsened. Madge married the year after their father's death and moved to Cheadle,
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Cheshire; Monty was overseas, serving in a British regiment. Christie now lived alone at Ashfield with her mother. In 1902, she began attending Miss Guyer's Girls' School in Torquay but found it difficult to adjust to the disciplined atmosphere. In 1905, her mother sent her to Paris, where she was educated in a series of boarding schools, focusing on voice training and piano playing. Deciding she lacked the temperament and talent, she gave up her goal of performing professionally as a concert pianist or an opera singer.
Early literary attempts, marriage, literary success 19071926
After completing her education, Christie returned to England to find her mother ailing. They decided to spend the northern winter of 19071908 in the warm climate of Egypt, which was then a regular tourist destination for wealthy Britons. They stayed for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel in Cairo. Christie attended many dances and other social functions; she particularly enjoyed watching amateur polo matches. While they vi
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sited some ancient Egyptian monuments such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, she did not exhibit the great interest in archaeology and Egyptology that developed in her later years. Returning to Britain, she continued her social activities, writing and performing in amateur theatricals. She also helped put on a play called The Blue Beard of Unhappiness with female friends.
At 18, Christie wrote her first short story, "The House of Beauty", while recovering in bed from an illness. It consisted of about 6,000 words on "madness and dreams", a subject of fascination for her. Her biographer, Janet Morgan, has commented that, despite "infelicities of style", the story was "compelling". The story became an early version of her story "The House of Dreams". Other stories followed, most of them illustrating her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These included "The Call of Wings" and "The Little Lonely God". Magazines rejected all her early submissions, made under pseudonyms including Mac Miller, Nathaniel Miller
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, and Sydney West; some submissions were later revised and published under her real name, often with new titles.
Around the same time, Christie began work on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert. Writing under the pseudonym Monosyllaba, she set the book in Cairo and drew upon her recent experiences there. She was disappointed when the six publishers she contacted declined the work. Clara suggested that her daughter ask for advice from the successful novelist Eden Phillpotts, a family friend and neighbour, who responded to her enquiry, encouraged her writing, and sent her an introduction to his own literary agent, Hughes Massie, who also rejected Snow Upon the Desert but suggested a second novel.
Meanwhile, Christie's social activities expanded, with country house parties, riding, hunting, dances, and roller skating. She had shortlived relationships with four men and an engagement to another. In October 1912, she was introduced to Archibald "Archie" Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford at Ugb
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rooke, about from Torquay. The son of a barrister in the Indian Civil Service, Archie was a Royal Artillery officer who was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps in April 1913. The couple quickly fell in love. Three months after their first meeting, Archie proposed marriage, and Agatha accepted.
With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Archie was sent to France to fight. They married on Christmas Eve 1914 at Emmanuel Church, Clifton, Bristol, close to the home of his mother and stepfather, while Archie was on home leave. Rising through the ranks, he was posted back to Britain in September 1918 as a colonel in the Air Ministry. Christie involved herself in the war effort as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. From October 1914 to May 1915, then from June 1916 to September 1918, she worked 3,400 hours in the Town Hall Red Cross Hospital, Torquay, first as a nurse unpaid then as a dispenser at 16 approximately a year from 1917 after qualifying as an apothecaries' assistant. Her war
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service ended in September 1918 when Archie was reassigned to London, and they rented a flat in St. John's Wood.
Christie had long been a fan of detective novels, having enjoyed Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle's early Sherlock Holmes stories. She wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1916. It featured Hercule Poirot, a former Belgian police officer with "magnificent moustaches" and a head "exactly the shape of an egg", who had taken refuge in Britain after Germany invaded Belgium. Christie's inspiration for the character came from Belgian refugees living in Torquay, and the Belgian soldiers she helped to treat as a volunteer nurse during the First World War. Her original manuscript was rejected by Hodder Stoughton and Methuen. After keeping the submission for several months, John Lane at The Bodley Head offered to accept it, provided that Christie change how the solution was revealed. She did so, and signed a contract committing h
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er next five books to The Bodley Head, which she later felt was exploitative. It was published in 1920.
Christie settled into married life, giving birth to her only child, Rosalind Margaret Clarissa later Hicks, in August 1919 at Ashfield. Archie left the Air Force at the end of the war and began working in the City financial sector at a relatively low salary. They still employed a maid. Her second novel, The Secret Adversary 1922, featured a new detective couple Tommy and Tuppence, again published by The Bodley Head. It earned her 50 approximately . A third novel, Murder on the Links, again featured Poirot, as did the short stories commissioned by Bruce Ingram, editor of The Sketch magazine, from 1923. She now had no difficulty selling her work.
In 1922, the Christies joined an aroundtheworld promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition, led by Major Ernest Belcher. Leaving their daughter with Agatha's mother and sister, in 10 months they travelled to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and
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Canada. They learned to surf prone in South Africa; then, in Waikiki, they were among the first Britons to surf standing up.
When they returned to England, Archie resumed work in the city, and Christie continued to work hard at her writing. After living in a series of apartments in London, they bought a house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, which they renamed Styles after the mansion in Christie's first detective novel.
Christie's mother, Clarissa Miller, died in April 1926. They had been exceptionally close, and the loss sent Christie into a deep depression. In August 1926, reports appeared in the press that Christie had gone to a village near Biarritz to recuperate from a "breakdown" caused by "overwork".
Disappearance 1926
In August 1926, Archie asked Agatha for a divorce. He had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, a friend of Major Belcher. On 3December 1926, the pair quarrelled after Archie announced his plan to spend the weekend with friends, unaccompanied by his wife. Late that evening, Christie disappea
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red from their home in Sunningdale. The following morning, her car, a Morris Cowley, was discovered at Newlands Corner, parked above a chalk quarry with an expired driving licence and clothes inside.
The disappearance quickly became a news story, as the press sought to satisfy their readers' "hunger for sensation, disaster, and scandal". Home Secretary William JoynsonHicks pressured police, and a newspaper offered a 100 reward approximately . More than a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers, and several aeroplanes searched the rural landscape. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave a spirit medium one of Christie's gloves to find her. Christie's disappearance was featured on the front page of The New York Times. Despite the extensive manhunt, she was not found for another 10 days. On 14 December 1926, she was located at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, north of her home in Sunningdale, registered as Mrs Tressa Neele the surname of her husband's lover from " S.A." South Africa. The next day, C
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hristie left for her sister's residence at Abney Hall, Cheadle, where she was sequestered "in guarded hall, gates locked, telephone cut off, and callers turned away".
Christie's autobiography makes no reference to the disappearance. Two doctors diagnosed her as suffering from "an unquestionable genuine loss of memory", yet opinion remains divided over the reason for her disappearance. Some, including her biographer Morgan, believe she disappeared during a fugue state. The author Jared Cade concluded that Christie planned the event to embarrass her husband but did not anticipate the resulting public melodrama. Christie biographer Laura Thompson provides an alternative view that Christie disappeared during a nervous breakdown, conscious of her actions but not in emotional control of herself. Public reaction at the time was largely negative, supposing a publicity stunt or an attempt to frame her husband for murder.
Second marriage and later life 19271976
In January 1927, Christie, looking "very pale", sailed
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with her daughter and secretary to Las Palmas, Canary Islands, to "complete her convalescence", returning three months later. Christie petitioned for divorce and was granted a decree nisi against her husband in April 1928, which was made absolute in October 1928. Archie married Nancy Neele a week later. Christie retained custody of their daughter, Rosalind, and kept the Christie surname for her writing.
Reflecting on the period in her autobiography, Christie wrote, "So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it."
In 1928, Christie left England and took the Simplon Orient Express to Istanbul and then to Baghdad. In Iraq, she became friends with archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife, who invited her to return to their dig in February 1930. On that second trip, she met archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. In a 1977 interview, Mallowan recounted his first meeting with Christie, when he took her and a group of tourists on a tour of his expedition site i
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n Iraq. Christie and Mallowan married in Edinburgh in September 1930. Their marriage lasted until Christie's death in 1976. She accompanied Mallowan on his archaeological expeditions, and her travels with him contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels such as Peril at End House were set in and around Torquay, where she was raised. Christie drew on her experience of international train travel when writing her 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. The Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, the eastern terminus of the railway, claims the book was written there and maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author.
Christie and Mallowan lived in Chelsea, first in Cresswell Place and later in Sheffield Terrace. Both properties are now marked by blue plaques. In 1934, they bought Winterbrook House in Winterbrook, a hamlet near Wallingford. This was their main residence for the rest of their lives and the place where Christie did much of her writing. This house also bears a
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blue plaque. Christie led a quiet life despite being known in Wallingford; from 1951 to 1976 she served as president of the local amateur dramatic society.
The couple acquired the Greenway Estate in Devon as a summer residence in 1938; it was given to the National Trust in 2000. Christie frequently stayed at Abney Hall, Cheshire, which was owned by her brotherinlaw, James Watts, and based at least two stories there a short story "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" in the story collection of the same name and the novel After the Funeral. One Christie compendium notes that "Abney became Agatha's greatest inspiration for countryhouse life, with all its servants and grandeur being woven into her plots. The descriptions of the fictional Chimneys, Stonygates, and other houses in her stories are mostly Abney Hall in various forms."
During World War II, Christie worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital UCH, London, where she updated her knowledge of poisons. Her later novel The Pale Horse was base
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d on a suggestion from Harold Davis, the chief pharmacist at UCH. In 1977, a thallium poisoning case was solved by British medical personnel who had read Christie's book and recognised the symptoms she described.
The British intelligence agency MI5 investigated Christie after a character called Major Bletchley appeared in her 1941 thriller N or M?, which was about a hunt for a pair of deadly fifth columnists in wartime England. MI5 was concerned that Christie had a spy in Britain's topsecret codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park. The agency's fears were allayed when Christie told her friend, the codebreaker Dilly Knox, "I was stuck there on my way by train from Oxford to London and took revenge by giving the name to one of my least lovable characters."
Christie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In honour of her many literary works, Christie was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire CBE in the 1956 New Year Honours. She was copresident of the Detection Club from
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1958 to her death in 1976. In 1961, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Literature degree by the University of Exeter. In the 1971 New Year Honours, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire DBE, three years after her husband had been knighted for his archaeological work. After her husband's knighthood, Christie could also be styled Lady Mallowan.
From 1971 to 1974, Christie's health began to fail, but she continued to write. Her last novel was Postern of Fate in 1973. Textual analysis suggested that Christie may have begun to suffer from Alzheimer's disease or other dementia at about this time.
Personal qualities
In 1946, Christie said of herself "My chief dislikes are crowds, loud noises, gramophones and cinemas. I dislike the taste of alcohol and do not like smoking. I do like sun, sea, flowers, travelling, strange foods, sports, concerts, theatres, pianos, and doing embroidery."
Christie's works of fiction contain some character stereotypes seen as objectionable in moder
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n times, but in real life, many of her biases were positive. After four years of wartorn London, Christie hoped to return some day to Syria, which she described as a "gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life; who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible".
Christie was a lifelong, "quietly devout" member of the Church of England, attended church regularly, and kept her mother's copy of The Imitation of Christ by her bedside. After her divorce, she stopped taking the sacrament of communion.
The Agatha Christie Trust For Children was established in 1969, and shortly after Christie's death a charitable memorial fund was set up to "help two causes that she favoured old people and young children".
Christie's obituary in The Times notes that "she never cared much for the cinema, or for wireless and television." Further,
Dame Agatha's private pleasures were gardeningshe won local prizes for
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horticultureand buying furniture for her various houses. She was a shy person she disliked public appearances but she was friendly and sharpwitted to meet. By inclination as well as breeding she belonged to the English upper middleclass. She wrote about, and for, people like herself. That was an essential part of her charm.
Death and estate
Death and burial
Christie died peacefully on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her home at Winterbrook House. When her death was announced, two West End theatresthe St. Martin's, where The Mousetrap was playing, and the Savoy, which was home to a revival of Murder at the Vicaragedimmed their outside lights in her honour. She was buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey, in a plot she had chosen with her husband 10 years before. The simple funeral service was attended by about 20 newspaper and TV reporters, some having travelled from as far away as South America. 30 wreaths adorned Christie's grave, including one from the cast of her longrunn
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ing play The Mousetrap and one sent "on behalf of the multitude of grateful readers" by the Ulverscroft Large Print Book Publishers.
Mallowan, who remarried in 1977, died in 1978 and was buried next to Christie.
Estate and subsequent ownership of works
Christie was unhappy about becoming "an employed wage slave", and for tax reasons set up a private company in 1955, Agatha Christie Limited, to hold the rights to her works. In about 1959 she transferred her 278acre home, Greenway Estate, to her daughter, Rosalind Hicks. In 1968, when Christie was almost 80, she sold a 51 stake in Agatha Christie Limited and the works it owned to Booker Books better known as Booker Author's Division, which by 1977 had increased its stake to 64. Agatha Christie Limited still owns the worldwide rights for more than 80 of Christie's novels and short stories, 19 plays, and nearly 40 TV films.
In the late 1950s, Christie had reputedly been earning around 100,000 approximately per year. Christie sold an estimated 300 million bo
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oks during her lifetime. At the time of her death in 1976, "she was the bestselling novelist in history."
One estimate of her total earnings from more than a halfcentury of writing is 20 million approximately million in . As a result of her tax planning, her will left only 106,683 approximately net, which went mostly to her husband and daughter along with some smaller bequests. Her remaining 36 share of Agatha Christie Limited was inherited by Hicks, who passionately preserved her mother's works, image, and legacy until her own death 28 years later. The family's share of the company allowed them to appoint 50 of the board and the chairman, and retain a veto over new treatments, updated versions, and republications of her works.
In 2004, Hicks' obituary in The Telegraph noted that she had been "determined to remain true to her mother's vision and to protect the integrity of her creations" and disapproved of "merchandising" activities. Upon her death on 28 October 2004, the Greenway Estate passed to her son
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Mathew Prichard. After his stepfather's death in 2005, Prichard donated Greenway and its contents to the National Trust.
Christie's family and family trusts, including greatgrandson James Prichard, continue to own the 36 stake in Agatha Christie Limited, and remain associated with the company. In 2020, James Prichard was the company's chairman. Mathew Prichard also holds the copyright to some of his grandmother's later literary works including The Mousetrap. Christie's work continues to be developed in a range of adaptations.
In 1998, Booker sold its shares in Agatha Christie Limited at the time earning 2,100,000, approximately annual revenue for 10,000,000 approximately to Chorion, whose portfolio of authors' works included the literary estates of Enid Blyton and Dennis Wheatley. In February 2012, after a management buyout, Chorion began to sell off its literary assets. This included the sale of Chorion's 64 stake in Agatha Christie Limited to Acorn Media UK. In 2014, RLJ Entertainment Inc. RLJE acquired
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Acorn Media UK, renamed it Acorn Media Enterprises, and incorporated it as the RLJE UK development arm.
In late February 2014, media reports stated that the BBC had acquired exclusive TV rights to Christie's works in the UK previously associated with ITV and made plans with Acorn's cooperation to air new productions for the 125th anniversary of Christie's birth in 2015. As part of that deal, the BBC broadcast Partners in Crime and And Then There Were None, both in 2015. Subsequent productions have included The Witness for the Prosecution but plans to televise Ordeal by Innocence at Christmas 2017 were delayed because of controversy surrounding one of the cast members. The threepart adaptation aired in April 2018. A threepart adaptation of The A.B.C. Murders starring John Malkovich and Rupert Grint began filming in June 2018 and was first broadcast in December 2018. A twopart adaptation of The Pale Horse was broadcast on BBC1 in February 2020. Death Comes as the End will be the next BBC adaptation.
Works
W
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orks of fiction
Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple
Christie's first published book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was released in 1920 and introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 33 of her novels and more than 50 short stories.
Over the years, Christie grew tired of Poirot, much as Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes. By the end of the 1930s, Christie wrote in her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable", and by the 1960s she felt he was "an egocentric creep". Thompson believes Christie's occasional antipathy to her creation is overstated, and points out that "in later life she sought to protect him against misrepresentation as powerfully as if he were her own flesh and blood." Unlike Conan Doyle, she resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She married off Poirot's "Watson", Captain Arthur Hastings, in an attempt to trim her cast commitments.
Miss Jane Marple was introduced in a series of short stories that began publication in December 1927
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and were subsequently collected under the title The Thirteen Problems. Marple was a genteel, elderly spinster who solved crimes using analogies to English village life. Christie said, "Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was," but her autobiography establishes a firm connection between the fictional character and Christie's stepgrandmother Margaret Miller "AuntieGrannie" and her "Ealing cronies". Both Marple and Miller "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right". Marple appeared in 12 novels and 20 stories.
During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, Curtain and Sleeping Murder, featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, respectively. Both books were sealed in a bank vault, and she made over the copyrights by deed of gift to her daughter and her husband to provide each with a kind of insurance policy. Christie suffered a heart attack a
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nd a serious fall in 1974, after which she was unable to write. Her daughter authorised the publication of Curtain in 1975, and Sleeping Murder was published posthumously in 1976. These publications followed the success of the 1974 film version of Murder on the Orient Express.
Shortly before the publication of Curtain, Poirot became the first fictional character to have an obituary in The New York Times, which was printed on page one on 6August 1975.
Christie never wrote a novel or short story featuring both Poirot and Miss Marple. In a recording discovered and released in 2008, Christie revealed the reason for this "Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady. Hercule Poirota professional sleuthwould not be at home at all in Miss Marple's world."
In 2013, the Christie family supported the release of a new Poirot story, The Monogram Murders, written by British author Sophie Hannah. Hannah later published three mor
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e Poirot mysteries, Closed Casket in 2016, The Mystery of Three Quarters in 2018., and The Killings at Kingfisher Hill in 2020.
Formula and plot devices
Christie has been called the "Duchess of Death", the "Mistress of Mystery", and the "Queen of Crime". Early in her career, a reporter noted that "her plots are possible, logical, and always new." According to Hannah, "At the start of each novel, she shows us an apparently impossible situation and we go mad wondering 'How can this be happening?' Then, slowly, she reveals how the impossible is not only possible but the only thing that could have happened."
She developed her storytelling techniques during what has been called the "Golden Age" of detective fiction. Author Dilys Winn called Christie "the doyenne of Coziness", a subgenre which "featured a small village setting, a hero with faintly aristocratic family connections, a plethora of red herrings and a tendency to commit homicide with sterling silver letter openers and poisons imported from Paraguay".
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At the end, in a Christie hallmark, the detective usually gathers the surviving suspects into one room, explains the course of their deductive reasoning, and reveals the guilty party; there are exceptions where it is left to the guilty party to explain all such as And Then There Were None and Endless Night.
Christie did not limit herself to quaint English villagesthe action might take place on a small island And Then There Were None, an aeroplane Death in the Clouds, a train Murder on the Orient Express, a steamship Death on the Nile, a smart London flat Cards on the Table, a resort in the West Indies A Caribbean Mystery, or an archaeological dig Murder in Mesopotamiabut the circle of potential suspects is usually closed and intimate family members, friends, servants, business associates, fellow travellers. Stereotyped characters abound the , the stolid policeman, the devoted servant, the dull colonel, but these may be subverted to stymie the reader; impersonations and secret alliances are always possible.
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There is always a motivemost often, money "There are very few killers in Christie who enjoy murder for its own sake."
Professor of Pharmacology Michael C. Gerald noted that "in over half her novels, one or more victims are poisoned, albeit not always to the full satisfaction of the perpetrator." Guns, knives, garrottes, tripwires, blunt instruments, and even a hatchet were also used, but "Christie never resorted to elaborate mechanical or scientific means to explain her ingenuity," according to John Curran, author and literary adviser to the Christie estate. Many of her clues are mundane objects a calendar, a coffee cup, wax flowers, a beer bottle, a fireplace used during a heat wave.
According to crime writer P. D. James, Christie was prone to making the unlikeliest character the guilty party. Alert readers could sometimes identify the culprit by identifying the least likely suspect. Christie mocked this insight in her foreword to Cards on the Table "Spot the person least likely to have committed the crime
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and in nine times out of ten your task is finished. Since I do not want my faithful readers to fling away this book in disgust, I prefer to warn them beforehand that this is not that kind of book."
On Desert Island Discs in 2007, Brian Aldiss said Christie had told him she wrote her books up to the last chapter, then decided who the most unlikely suspect was, after which she would go back and make the necessary changes to "frame" that person. Based upon a study of her working notebooks, Curran describes how Christie would first create a cast of characters, choose a setting, and then produce a list of scenes in which specific clues would be revealed; the order of scenes would be revised as she developed her plot. Of necessity, the murderer had to be known to the author before the sequence could be finalised and she began to type or dictate the first draft of her novel. Much of the work, particularly dialogue, was done in her head before she put it on paper.
In 2013, the 600 members of the Crime Writers' Ass
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ociation chose The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as "the best whodunit... ever written". Author Julian Symons observed, "In an obvious sense, the book fits within the conventions... The setting is a village deep within the English countryside, Roger Ackroyd dies in his study; there is a butler who behaves suspiciously... Every successful detective story in this period involved a deceit practised upon the reader, and here the trick is the highly original one of making the murderer the local doctor, who tells the story and acts as Poirot's Watson." Critic Sutherland Scott stated, "If Agatha Christie had made no other contribution to the literature of detective fiction she would still deserve our grateful thanks" for writing this novel.
In September 2015, to mark her 125th birthday, And Then There Were None was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate. The novel is emblematic of both her use of formula and her willingness to discard it. "And Then There Were None carries the 'c
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losed society' type of murder mystery to extreme lengths," according to author Charles Osborne. It begins with the classic setup of potential victims and killers isolated from the outside world, but then violates conventions. There is no detective involved in the action, no interviews of suspects, no careful search for clues, and no suspects gathered together in the last chapter to be confronted with the solution. As Christie herself said, "Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious." Critics agreed she had succeeded "The arrogant Mrs. Christie this time set herself a fearsome test of her own ingenuity... the reviews, not surprisingly, were without exception wildly adulatory."
Character stereotypes and perceived racism
Christie included stereotyped descriptions of characters in her work, especially before 1945 when such attitudes were more commonly expressed publicly, particularly in regard to Italians, Jews, and nonEuropeans. For example, she described "men of Hebra
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ic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses, wearing rather flamboyant jewellery" in the short story "The Soul of the Croupier" from the collection The Mysterious Mr Quin. In 1947, the AntiDefamation League in the US sent an official letter of complaint to Christie's American publishers, Dodd, Mead and Company, regarding perceived antisemitism in her works. Christie's British literary agent later wrote to her US representative, authorising American publishers to "omit the word 'Jew' when it refers to an unpleasant character in future books."
In The Hollow, published in 1946, one of the characters is described by another as "a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake ... a small woman with a thick nose, henna red and a disagreeable voice". To contrast with the more stereotyped descriptions, Christie portrayed some "foreign" characters as victims, or potential victims, at the hands of English malefactors, such as, respectively, Olga Seminoff Hallowe'en Party and Katrina Reiger in the shor
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t story "How Does Your Garden Grow?". Jewish characters are often seen as unEnglish such as Oliver Manders in Three Act Tragedy, but they are rarely the culprits.
Other detectives
In addition to Poirot and Marple, Christie also created amateur detectives Thomas Beresford and his wife, Prudence "Tuppence" ne Cowley, who appear in four novels and one collection of short stories published between 1922 and 1974. Unlike her other sleuths, the Beresfords were only in their early twenties when introduced in The Secret Adversary, and were allowed to age alongside their creator. She treated their stories with a lighter touch, giving them a "dash and verve" which was not universally admired by critics. Their last adventure, Postern of Fate, was Christie's last novel.
Harley Quin was "easily the most unorthodox" of Christie's fictional detectives. Inspired by Christie's affection for the figures from the Harlequinade, the semisupernatural Quin always works with an elderly, conventional man called Satterthwaite. The
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pair appear in 14 short stories, 12 of which were collected in 1930 as The Mysterious Mr. Quin. Mallowan described these tales as "detection in a fanciful vein, touching on the fairy story, a natural product of Agatha's peculiar imagination". Satterthwaite also appears in a novel, Three Act Tragedy, and a short story, "Dead Man's Mirror", both of which feature Poirot.
Another of her lesserknown characters is Parker Pyne, a retired civil servant who assists unhappy people in an unconventional manner. The 12 short stories which introduced him, Parker Pyne Investigates 1934, are best remembered for "The Case of the Discontented Soldier", which features Ariadne Oliver, "an amusing and satirical selfportrait of Agatha Christie". Over the ensuing decades, Oliver reappeared in seven novels. In most of them she assists Poirot.
Plays
In 1928, Michael Morton adapted The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the stage under the title Alibi. The play enjoyed a respectable run, but Christie disliked the changes made to her work
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and, in future, preferred to write for the theatre herself. The first of her own stage works was Black Coffee, which received good reviews when it opened in the West End in late 1930. She followed this up with adaptations of her detective novels And Then There Were None in 1943, Appointment with Death in 1945, and The Hollow in 1951.
In the 1950s, "the theatre ... engaged much of Agatha's attention." She next adapted her short radio play into The Mousetrap, which premiered in the West End in 1952, produced by Peter Saunders. Her expectations for the play were not high; she believed it would run no more than eight months. It has long since made theatrical history, staging its 27,500th performance in September 2018. The play closed down in March 2020, when all UK theatres shut due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In 1953, she followed this with Witness for the Prosecution, whose Broadway production won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best foreign play of 1954 and earned Christie an Edgar Award from
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the Mystery Writers of America. Spider's Web, an original work written for actress Margaret Lockwood at her request, premiered in 1954 and was also a hit. She is also the first female playwright to have three plays running simultaneously in London's West End The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution and Spider's Web. Christie said, "Plays are much easier to write than books, because you can see them in your mind's eye, you are not hampered by all that description which clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you from getting on with what's happening." In a letter to her daughter, Christie said being a playwright was "a lot of fun!"
As Mary Westmacott
Christie published six mainstream novels under the name Mary Westmacott, a pseudonym which gave her the freedom to explore "her most private and precious imaginative garden". These books typically received better reviews than her detective and thriller fiction. Of the first, Giant's Bread published in 1930, a reviewer for The New York Times wrote, "...her b
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ook is far above the average of current fiction, in fact, comes well under the classification of a 'good book'. And it is only a satisfying novel that can claim that appellation." It was publicized from the very beginning that "Mary Westmacott" was a pen name of a wellknown author, although the identity behind the pen name was kept secret; the dust jacket of Giant's Bread mentions that the author had previously written "under her real name...half a dozen books that have each passed the thirty thousand mark in sales." In fact, though this was technically true, it disguised Christie's identity through understatement. By the publication of Giant's Bread, Christie had published 10 novels and two short story collections, all of which had sold considerably more than 30,000 copies. After Christie's authorship of the first four Westmacott novels was revealed by a journalist in 1949, she wrote two more, the last in 1956.
The other Westmacott titles are Unfinished Portrait 1934, Absent in the Spring 1944, The Rose
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and the Yew Tree 1948, A Daughter's a Daughter 1952, and The Burden 1956.
Nonfiction works
Christie published few nonfiction works. Come, Tell Me How You Live, about working on an archaeological dig, was drawn from her life with Mallowan. The Grand Tour Around the World with the Queen of Mystery is a collection of correspondence from her 1922 Grand Tour of the British empire, including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Agatha Christie An Autobiography was published posthumously in 1977 and adjudged the Best Critical Biographical Work at the 1978 Edgar Awards.
Titles
Many of Christie's works from 1940 onward have titles drawn from literature, with the original context of the title typically printed as an epigraph.
The inspirations for some of Christie's titles include
William Shakespeare's works Sad Cypress, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, There is a Tide..., Absent in the Spring, and The Mousetrap, for example. Osborne notes that "Shakespeare is the writer most quoted in the works of Ag
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atha Christie";
The Bible Evil Under the Sun, The Burden, and The Pale Horse;
Other works of literature The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side from Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott", The Moving Finger from Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubiyt of Omar Khayym, The Rose and the Yew Tree from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Postern of Fate from James Elroy Flecker's "Gates of Damascus", Endless Night from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", N or M? from the Book of Common Prayer, and Come, Tell Me How You Live from Lewis Carroll's Through the LookingGlass.
Christie biographer Gillian Gill said, "Christie's writing has the sparseness, the directness, the narrative pace, and the universal appeal of the fairy story, and it is perhaps as modern fairy stories for grownup children that Christie's novels succeed." Reflecting a juxtaposition of innocence and horror, numerous Christie titles were drawn from wellknown children's nursery rhymes And Then There Were None from "Ten Little Niggers", One, Two, Buckle
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