When Camus looked back over his early autobiographical writings, where he had tried to depict his feelings about his family background of poverty and cultural deprivation in Algiers, he felt very dissatisfied. He said he was only too conscious of the immaturity of these essays: he even believed that if he did not make another attempt at this subject he would have achieved nothing. So Camus began thinking about The First Man, a novel that was to be different from anything he had written before. It would be a “traditional novel,” although he had doubts about whether he was really a “traditional” writer. The new work was to be the truly authentic novel of his maturity.

Propelled by the tragedy of the French-Algerian conflict (1954–62), with its twin horrors of torture and terror, Camus was aiming at an epic on a Tolstoyan scale, his own personal War and Peace. This book would at last fully explain...

 

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