The First Man

Camus's unfinished autobiographical novel — manuscript found in his fatal 1960 car crash, published 1994

Tradition: French existentialism / absurdism / autobiographical fiction

Camus's posthumous 1994 'The First Man' — unfinished autobiographical novel found in the wreckage of his fatal 1960 car crash

Found in the briefcase Camus was carrying when he died in a car crash on the road from Lourmarin to Paris on 4 January 1960 (with Michel Gallimard, the nephew of his publisher; Camus had reluctantly accepted a lift after planning to take the train), 'Le Premier homme' is his unfinished autobiographical novel. The manuscript — 144 handwritten pages — was given by Francine Camus to her children with instructions not to publish until both Camus parents were dead; Catherine Camus, his daughter, finally published it in 1994 (34 years after his death). The book is divided into two parts. Part I ('Search for the Father' — 'Recherche du Père') traces Jacques Cormery's childhood in colonial Algiers — Camus's own childhood thinly fictionalised. The narrative threads: the early death of Jacques's father at the 1914 Battle of the Marne; his pied-noir mother Catherine, deaf and almost illiterate; his maternal grandmother who beat him; the schoolteacher M. Bernard (Camus's actual teacher Louis Germain, to whom Camus dedicated his Nobel acceptance speech) who recognised Jacques's intellectual gift; the working-class Belcourt quarter of Algiers where the family lived; the family's poverty; Jacques's love for his absent father whose grave he eventually visits in Saint-Brieuc (the scene that opens the novel, after which Camus apparently planned to flash back to the childhood). Part II ('The Son or the First Man' — 'Le Fils ou le Premier homme'), which would have treated Jacques's adult life, was barely begun — only a few chapters survive in draft. The manuscript is rougher than Camus's polished work but is a major late document — and the most directly autobiographical of his books. Camus had been planning the novel for years; he told friends he believed it would be his best book.