Albert Camus: A Life

Vibrant and comprehensive, this biography of Albert Camus, the internationally acclaimed author of The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, draws upon a wealth of resources never before available personal correspondence, notebooks, public records as well as exclusive interviews with Camus’s family, friends, colleagues, mentors, and lovers.

What emerges is a vigorously researched and abundantly revelatory study of a man caught in conflicts between family loyalties and his own passionate nature, between the call to political action and a devotion to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten indigent whites.

Exploring Camus’s impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, his underground activities during the Occupation in Paris, the intrigues of the French literati who embraced him after the publication of his first novel, L’Etranger, this meticulously detailed volume uncovers a solitary man behind the mask of celebrity. It reveals a writer isolated by his own success, crippled by the charms of women he could not resist, debilitated by the tuberculosis that did not kill him. The auto accident that did adds only to the iromes in the sometimes fabulous, often turbulent life of this giant of twentieth century literature.