A prominent intellectual, his nonfiction books and novels explored his complex identity as an anti-imperialist, deeply related to his ardent Zionism.

During World War II, he was studying philosophy at the University of Algiers when France's collaborationist Vichy regime implemented anti-Semitic laws.

After the war, Memmi resumed his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and married Marie-Germaine Dubach, a French Catholic, with whom he had three children.

[7] Memmi's well-regarded first novel, La statue de sel (translated as The Pillar of Salt), was published in 1953 with a preface by Albert Camus and was awarded the Fénéon Prize in 1954.

The work is often read in conjunction with Frantz Fanon's Les damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism.

In this book, Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states.

Reviewing Memmi's fiction, scholar Judith Roumani asserts that the Tunisian writer's work "reveals the same philosophical evolution over time from his original viewpoints to less radical but perhaps more realistic positions."

"[10] In his review for The New York Times, essayist and critic Richard Locke Albert Memmi's earlier novels as memoirs "recorded with a cleareyed sensitivity, a modest candor, and remarkable strength."

Locke further wrote, "But ultimately, it is Memmi's heart, not his skill, that moves you: the sights and sounds of Tunis, the childhood memories, the brothers' sympathetic and contrasting voices, their all-too-human feelings, have a resonance that reawakens for a while the ghost of European humanism.

In this way, Memmi's arguments for racism as a social construct were important in refuting the notion of science as a basis for racist thought.