Albert Camus grew up poor in French Algeria, won the Nobel Prize for Literature at forty-four, and died in a car crash at forty-six with an unused train ticket in his pocket. He wrote The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus — works that defined absurdism and told a generation that life was meaningless but worth living fully anyway. His refusal to choose sides in the Algerian War cost him friendships, his public reputation, and his relationship with Sartre.

This episode traces Camus from his impoverished Algerian childhood through the Resistance journalism that made him famous, the philosophical break with Sartre, and the car crash that cut short one of the twentieth century's most original minds.

• Camus's poverty in Algeria, his illiterate mother, and the teacher who changed his life
• The Stranger, The Myth of Si ...