Albert Camus was born in Algeria, then a part of France, and grew up very poor in a working-class neighborhood of Algiers. His father was killed in the First World War when Albert was not yet one. His mother, who was nearly deaf and could not read, cleaned houses, and the family lived with his stern grandmother in a small apartment with no running water.

A primary school teacher, Louis Germain, saw his gifts and helped him win a scholarship to high school. Camus never forgot it. When he won the Nobel Prize, he wrote to Germain to say that without him, none of it would have happened. As a teenager he was also a keen goalkeeper, until tuberculosis, at seventeen, ended his football and shadowed the rest of his life. He later said that what he knew most surely about morality and the obligations of men, he owed to football.

He became a journalist in Algiers, reporting on the poverty of the Kabyle region and on unjust trials. During the Second World War, in occupied France, he worked for the Resistance newspaper Combat, and became its editor.

His first novel, The Stranger (1942), begins with one of the most famous openings in modern fiction: “Today, Maman died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” Its narrator, Meursault, kills a man on a blinding beach, almost by accident, and is condemned less for the killing than for failing to cry at his mother’s funeral. The same year, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus took up the question of how to live in a world without ultimate meaning, and ended with the image of Sisyphus pushing his rock up the mountain forever: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The Plague (1947), about an epidemic in the Algerian city of Oran, was read as a story of occupation and resistance, and found new readers in 2020.

In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize at forty-four, one of the youngest ever to receive it. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car crash in France, driving back to Paris with his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard. An unused train ticket was in his pocket. In the wreck was the unfinished manuscript of an autobiographical novel, The First Man, which his daughter published in 1994.