Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know themselves to be an intrusion, albeit one with an edge. While both are beggars at the gate, each one singing for a bit of supper, salesmen are independent entrepreneurs, pretty much calling their own shots; writers, on the other hand, are performers in someone else’s show—a talk at ten, a class at twelve, a panel at three, a reading at seven, and oh, did I forget the ten or twelve interviews tucked in at every break in the day?—all the while being dragged around by people otherwise known as “handlers” who every half-hour tell them how much they are loved, how much their work is prized, how many lives it has changed, and yes, they know how tired you must be by now, but would you mind giving just one more very small interview, this guy’s been waiting all day to talk to you.
By now it’s ten or eleven at night, and you, the writer, are sitting in a restaurant, still smiling and nodding at a tableful of people whose small talk is nailing you to the wall. The handler can see you’re falling off your feet, but believe her (it’s almost always a her), it will be good for the book if you could just have one more drink with one more admirer.
So if you happen to be a veteran of this circuit, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that one day in 1949, in the middle of a two-month-long South American book tour, the celebrated French writer Albert Camus, a man who’d recently endured the German occupation of Paris, wrote in his diary, “Obliged to admit that for the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse.”
Albert Camus was already a cultural hero of the West when in March 1946 he crossed the Atlantic by ship and arrived in New York City, the first port of call on a North American tour undertaken to promote the publication in English of his 1942 novel The Stranger. Three years later, after finishing his second novel, The Plague, a book that would bring him world fame, he again crossed the Atlantic by ship, this time landing in Rio de Janeiro, where he delivered the first of the lectures he was due to give in South America. Now a selection of Camus’s diary entries from those two trips comes to us in the form of a slim volume of 148 pages that allows us to glimpse something of the emotional experience of a literary great on a book tour….
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/23/camus-on-tour-travels-in-the-americas/
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Albert Camus: The Almond Trees (1940)
Invincible Summer – Albert Camus
ALBERT CAMUS: by Nicola Chiaromonte
Albert Camus: Create Dangerously (1957)
Resistance, Rebellion, & Writing – Albert Camus’s dispatches on the Algerian crisis
After the truth-shower 