In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus found himself moved to ask whether he believed life worth living; that is, how he must stand on the question of suicide. In The Rebel (1951) he found himself moved to ask how he must stand on the question of murder. The root question of both books is how we can transcend history; both result from an assessment of our time which kept on haunting their author. "The fundamental subject of "The Myth of Sisyphus' is this," Camus wrote in the 1955 Preface: