The First Man

infobox Book |
name = The First Man
title_orig = Le Premier Homme
translator = David Hapgood


image_caption = Vintage International's 1995 edition "The First Man", translated by David Hapgood.
author = Albert Camus
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = France
language = French
series =
genre =
publisher = Knopf
release_date = 1995
english_release_date =
media_type =
pages =
isbn =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The First Man" (French title: "Le Premier homme") is Albert Camus' unfinished final novel.

On January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six, Camus was killed in a car accident outside Paris. The incomplete manuscript of "The First Man", the autobiographical novel Camus was working on at the time of his death, was found in the mud at the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics agreed with his view, even in its unfinished state.

Plot summary

The novel takes Jacques Cormery from birth to his years in the lycee, or secondary school, in Algiers. In a departure from the intellectual and philosophical weight of his earlier works, Camus wanted this novel to be "heavy with things and flesh." It is a novel of basic and essential things: childhood, schooldays, the life of the body, the power of the sun and the sea, the painful love of a son for his mother, the search for a lost father. But it is also about the history of a colonial people in a vast and not always hospitable African landscape; about the complex relationship of a "mother" country to its colonists; about the intimate effects of war and political revolution. Most important, "The First Man" brings Camus to life again, giving us a view of the man-- visceral and vulnerable-- that has never before been revealed.