If writers only knew, or at least remembered in the solitary travail, what an impact they might have on the psyche of a reader, how with just a random insight or a phrase or even a prose style they can change the course of someone’s life, alter thinking forever.

In November 1943, from a cold room in the Hotel de la Minerve, Camus had written to a friend, “I feel curiously sterile, full of doubts and sad.” By November 1944, he had effectively entered history.

It was widely known that there were many women in Camus’s life. Beyond his good looks, charm and intelligence, he was serious, responsible, playful and passionate, and in the manner of the legendary Spanish suitor Don Juan, whom he singled out for praise in The Myth of Sisyphus, he also loved to love.

The name Albert Camus rarely shows up in the familiar roundup of artists and writers who suffered from tuberculosis... This means that Camus succeeded in keeping the nature of his condition from the public, or that it was effectively eclipsed by the drama of the car crash that proved to be deadlier sooner.

Camus had thoughts about refusing the Nobel Prize, or excepting it in absentia and sending a speech. He considered Malraux the proper recipient, and, it was, in any case, a disaster for him.

There is a reverberating irony in the fact that just as Camus was returning to his sources in Algeria and reaffirming his Algerian identity, he, as a pied noir, was losing his place in the land.