The First Man by Albert Camus

The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, which Camus had referred to as “the novel of my maturity,” was found in a mud-spattered briefcase near the wreckage of the car in which Camus died in January of 1960, when he was forty-six. Partly a novel of childhood and partly an epic narrative of his beloved Algeria, The First Man was intended to re-create Camus’s homeland– then still a colony in a traumatic struggle for independence– for the mainland French.