"What Hawes does brilliantly is bring to life Camus the human being: the charming friend, the seductive womanizer, the lifelong outsider `from somewhere else.'... [a] delicately perceptive text...a vast inner panorama."---Wendy Smith, Los Angeles TimesAlbert Carnus is best known for his contributions to twentieth-century literature---books like The Stranger spurred a revolution in existential thought. But who was Camus, beneath the trappings of literary fame? Elizabeth Hawes, who first became enamored with Camus as a young woman, embarks on a stunningly personal exploration that tells the story of the private Camus---and her dogged pursuit of him.Camus, a Romance reveals the man behind the name: the French-Algerian of humble birth and Mediterranean passions; the TB-stricken exile who edited the World War II resistance newspaper Combat; the Don Juan who loved a multitude of women; the writer in search of a truer voice. These form only the barest outlines of Camus's life, which Hawes chronicles alongside her own experience, visiting the spaces Camus inhabited---the cafes of Paris, the streets of New York City, and his villa in Provence---and meeting his friends and family in an effort to better know her favorite author.Camus, a Romance is a unique literary feat, at once biography and memoir. Wrought with passion and rich detail, it is the story not only of Camus himself, but of the relationship between a reader and a beloved writer."[A] memoir of literary obsession---that aesthetic wreck at the intersection of biography, confession, literary criticism, travelogue, love letter, and detective story."---Sam Anderson, New York Read Less