In this vibrant, engaging biography of Albert Camus, the internationally acclaimed author of The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has richly tapped resources never before availablepersonal correspondence, notebooks, public records, as well as exclusive interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, mentors, and lovers. What emerges is the study of a man caught in conflicts between family loyalties and his own passionate nature, between the call to political action and devotion to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and...

Albert Camus is among the most significant French writers of the twentieth century. Opening with his impoverished childhood in Algiers, this biography presents the historical context, focusing on Camus' later agonising conflict between sympathy for the working class Algerians and for the French colonials with a stake in their adopted land.