Albert Camus died instantly in a car crash on the 4th of January 1960, leaving behind a handwritten manuscript of 144 pages titled The First Man. This unfinished autobiography, discovered in the wreckage of his car, was the work he had predicted would be his finest before his death at the age of 46. The crash occurred near the small town of Villeblevin in the Yonne department of France, where Camus was traveling in the luxurious car of his publisher, Michel Gallimard. Camus, who had spent the New Year holiday with his family and the Gallimard family, decided to return to Paris alone in the car, leaving his wife and children to take the train. The vehicle struck a plane tree on a long straight stretch of the RN 6 highway, killing Camus and Gallimard's wife, while the driver and daughter survived. The tragedy cut short a life that had already secured his place as the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him in 1957 at the age of 44.
A Childhood Forged In Poverty
Under the influence of his teacher Louis Germain, Camus gained a scholarship in 1924 to continue his studies at a prestigious lyceum near Algiers. Germain immediately noticed his lively intelligence and his desire to learn, giving Camus free lessons to prepare him for the scholarship competition despite the fact that his grandmother had planned for him to be a manual worker to contribute to the family maintenance. Camus maintained great gratitude and affection towards Louis Germain throughout his life, dedicating his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to him. When he received the news of the award, he wrote that his first thought, after his mother, was of Germain, stating that without his teaching and example, none of it would have happened. Germain lovingly reciprocated the warm feelings in a letter dated the 30th of April 1959, calling him my little Camus. This relationship was foundational to Camus's intellectual development, as Germain introduced him to the world of ideas when he was a child from a poor background, setting the stage for his future as a writer and philosopher.
Camus began his work on the first cycle of his writings, dealing with the absurd and the meaningless, while he was in Paris during the German invasion of FranceThe Teacher Who Changed Everything
in 1940. He fled the advancing Germans and ended up in Lyon, where he married pianist and mathematician Francine Faure on the 3rd of December 1940. After moving back to Algeria and then to the French Alps on medical advice, he began writing his second cycle of works, which dealt with revolt, including the novel The Plague and the play The Misunderstanding. By 1943, he was known because of his earlier work, and he returned to Paris, where he met and became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus took an active role in the underground resistance movement against the Germans, working as a journalist and editor of the banned newspaper Combat. He used a pseudonym for his articles and false ID cards to avoid capture, composing almost daily editorials under his real name after the liberation of France. During this period, he wrote four Letters to a German Friend, explaining why resistance was necessary and asserting that the only moral value was courage.
After the war, Camus lived in Paris with his wife Francine Faure, who gave birth