Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, Algeria. His French father, Lucien Auguste Camus, was killed less than a year later at the Battle of the Marne in France during World War I. Camus was then raised by his mother Catherine (who was of Spanish descent) in a working-class area of Algiers. He attended the lycée (secondary school) until graduation in 1930, after which he studied literature and philosophy at the University of Algiers.

In 1930, Camus had his first attack of tuberculosis, from which he suffered all his life. In 1933, as Hitler came to power in Germany, Camus joined an anti-Fascist organization in Algiers, and in the mid-1930s he became a member of the Communist Party, helping to organize the Marxist-based Workers' Theatre. But a year after his graduation with a degree in philosophy in 1936, he broke with the communists. Until the beginning...