On of the major playwrights during this period was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre had been imprisoned in Germany in 1940 but managed to escape, and become one of the leaders of the Existential movement. Other popular playwrights were Albert Camus, and Jean Anouilh. Just like Anouilh, Camus accidentally became the spokesman for the French Underground when he wrote his famous essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe or The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the man condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down again. For Camus, this related heavily to everyday life, and he saw Sisyphus an absurd hero, with a pointless existance. Camus felt that it was necessary to wonder what the meaning of life was, and that the human being longed for some sense of clarity in the world, since if the world were clear, art would not exist.
The Myth of Sisyphus became a prototype for existentialism in the theatre, and eventually The Theatre of the Absurd. Sisyphus is the absurd......

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Title: Sisyphus: An Absurd Hero
Approximate Word Count: 2633
Approximate Pages: 11 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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