On January 4, 1960, a Facel Vega sports car crashed into a plane tree in a small French town, killing Albert Camus instantly. In the mud investigators found a 144-page handwritten manuscript, the autobiographical novel he believed would be his masterpiece. This episode traces his path from a destitute childhood in French Algeria, raised by a deaf, illiterate mother after his father was killed in World War I, to becoming the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

We cover the teacher Louis Germain who secretly tutored him for a scholarship, his years as a goalkeeper, the tuberculosis diagnosis at 17, his brief membership in the Communist Party, and his dangerous work editing the underground paper Combat during the occupation. Then we unpack the absurd, Sisyphus, The Stranger, and The Plague, his public feud with Sartre over Soviet communism, his troubled marriages, his anguished stance on the Algerian War, and the debated theory that the crash was a KGB assassination.

• Why the absurd is not nihilism and how it justified joining the resistance
• The bulldozer analogy for the Camus-Sartre split over ends and means
• Choosing his mother over justice: the 1957 press conference explained
• How he spent his Nobel money and why he thought he had won too young
• The First Man’s publication in the 1990s and his legacy as a skeptical humanist