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 ...