The First Man

A visually arresting adaptation of Albert Camus’s masterful biographical novel that offers a new graphic interpretation for the next generation of readers.

This new illustrated of Camus’s final novel tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like Camus’s own. This stunning, fully illustrated edition summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood defined by poverty and a father's death, yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria—and the young protagonist's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother.  

In telling the story of his metaphorical search for his father, who died in World War I, Camus returns to the "land of oblivion where each one is the first man" and must find his own answers. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed the Nobel Prize–winning novelist, this graphic interpretation of The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the life and work of one of the twenty century's greatest authors.

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. During World War II, he joined the Resistance movement in Paris, then became editor-in-chief of the newspaper Combat during the Liberation. A novelist, playwright, and essayist, he is most famous for his novels The Stranger and The Plague. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

Jacques Ferrandez was born in Algeria in 1955. In 1987, he began his Notebooks from the Orient, a series of panoramic portraits depicting the history of the French presence in Algeria, for which he was awarded the Historia Prix Spécial. An indisputable expert on the Algerian question, he adapted Camus’s novel The Stranger as well as his new interpretation of The First Man. His books have been the subject of many exhibitions in France and Algeria.

Ryan Bloom is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His translations and writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, New England Review, Guernica, PEN America, the American Prospect, and a variety of other publications. His translation of Albert Camus’ Notebooks 1951–1959 (Rowman and Littlefield) was nominated for the 2009 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Prize for Superior English translation of French prose. In 2014 he was awarded the Eli Cantor Fellowship by the Corporation of Yaddo.