Book Review: Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

In November 2019 I read a tiny Camus paperback and spent the next several months quoting it at everyone I knew. Then the world shut down, and in March 2020 I wrote an entire essay borrowing its title, because no other phrase fit the moment. “To create today is to create dangerously,” Camus told a room in 1957, and the line has followed me around ever since.

The premise: this is Camus’s lecture on the artist’s job in an ugly century, delivered right after he won the Nobel Prize, published here with two short companion speeches. His question is the one every artist eventually faces: when the world is on fire, is making art self-indulgent — or is it the job? His answer is the title.

What I Loved About Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

Camus refuses both easy exits. The artist who retreats into art for art’s sake gets dismantled, and so does the artist who turns propagandist. What’s left is the tightrope: make the thing, in public, about the world as it actually is, and accept that doing so will cost you something. I’ve walked a much smaller tightrope — when I founded a literary collective in LA, our boundary-pushing work drew backlash and even legal threats — and this book is the best pep talk I know for that moment. Backlash is your stamped receipt for boundary-pushing work. Camus just says it in French.

What I Didn’t Love About Create Dangerously

That it’s over in an afternoon. This is a pamphlet, not a shelf, and I wanted the full-length book on this argument. Camus never wrote one.

Final Thoughts on Create Dangerously

Essential, still. If your work has ever gotten you side-eyed, criticized, or threatened with a lawsuit (ask me how I know), Camus will hand you your spine back. I keep borrowing the phrase — it also snuck into my guide to making a scripted podcast at the end of the world — and he got to ‘the power and responsibility of the artist’ almost seventy years before I put ‘power’ in a book title of my own. Some arguments don’t age.

My final score: 5 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes! Read it the next time the news makes your work feel small.

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