The First Man - Libro en Inglés

The First Man – Albert Camus

When Albert Camus died in a car accident in 1960, a handwritten manuscript was found among his belongings. It was the first draft of The First Man, the novel he believed would be his masterpiece. Published more than thirty years later, it offers a profoundly personal portrait of the writer and the world that shaped him.

Jacques Cormery, a man of forty, travels to the French military cemetery where his father, killed in the First World War before Jacques was a year old, lies buried. Standing at the grave, he realizes that he is now older than his father ever was, and he sets out to discover who this unknown man had been.

His search leads him back to his childhood in a poor working-class neighborhood of Algiers, where he was raised by his nearly deaf, illiterate mother, his gentle uncle and his formidable grandmother, and to the schoolteacher who recognized his talent and opened the door to an education that changed his life. Camus evokes the sun, the sea, the games and the hardships of that childhood with extraordinary tenderness.

Lyrical, moving and deeply autobiographical, the novel is an evocation of poverty, family love, the Algerian landscape and the search for identity, written against the background of a land on the edge of war.

Presented as Camus left it, unfinished and unpolished, with his own notes and outline included, The First Man is an intimate glimpse into the heart of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and an essential book for his readers.