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Interview [published March 1997]
Albert Camus: Solitaire et Solidaire
Russell Wilkinson talks to Catherine Camus about Albert Camus’ The First Man
In January 1960, the French writer and philosopher
Albert Camus was killed in a car crash along with his
friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Recovered
from the wreckage of the crash was the unfinished
manuscript of Camus’ latest novel, The First Man. In
1957, Camus had been awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in recognition of his most famous novels,
The Outsider and The Plague.
Fifty years after its original publication The Outsider
is still France’s best-selling novel this century.
In October 1995, The First Man was finally published
in English, 35 years after Camus’ death. His daughter,
Catherine Camus, elected to publish the manuscript unedited.
Its drafts have been organised into the completed
text of the novel and authorial notes which supplement
its progression and development. As such, The First
Man shows the rarely glimpsed process of a work in
progress. The novel itself is a deeply autobiographical
meditation upon Camus’ poverty-stricken childhood
and fatherless family within Algeria at the turn of the
century. While it remains unfinished, much of the text
possesses Camus’ characteristic lucidity and sensuality,
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
clearly demonstrating that his best writing was yet to
come before his tragic and untimely death at the age
of 47.
Catherine Camus and her partner Robert Gallimard
visited London in October 1995. At the Basil Hotel,
they discussed the implications of The First Man for our
evaluation of Albert Camus as a writer and a political
philosopher at the close of this century. The interview
was conducted in French.
RW: In your editor’s note for The First Man you suggest
that now is a more suitable time for the reception of
Camus’ work. Do you think Camus has been neglected
in recent years?
CC: He was never abandoned by his readers. Camus
is enormously read. He’s the highest selling author in
the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some
years now. Sales haven’t ever stopped, so to talk about
rediscovering him would suggest that he isn’t read anymore
and that’s not true. It’s just that, in publishing The
First Man I said to myself, ‘this is going to be awful,’
but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I’m
not afraid of Camus’ public. I’m afraid of what will be
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