ALBERT CAMUS: A Life.<i> By Olivier Todd</i> .<i> Translated from the French by Benjamin Ivry</i> . <i> Alfred A. Knopf: 436 pp., $30</i>

For a generation of young intellectuals, Albert Camus was a uniquely personal hero. He was more than a novelist, essayist and playwright, and he was more than his characters and his prose, although this quality of transcendence necessarily came from his work. Rather than offer historical explanations or a philosophical system, Camus only bore witness and described the modern world, the world he called the Absurd, in such terms that it was intimately recognizable. He made a virtue of simple awareness and, as William Styron wrote in “Darkness Visible,” he set the tone of a new view of life and history. Confronting the mal d’esprit of his times, Camus offered an intellectual pronouncement: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Even in his pessimism, Camus provided a sense of solidarity and moral support that amounted to a message of courage. After the publication of his first books, he became a beloved everyman, the incarnation of the potential for nobility in nihilism, and he made his readers feel like moral revolutionaries for simply appreciating his message.

When Camus died in a car crash outside Paris in 1960, it was a tragic event in the world of letters. The photographs remain unforgettable: the lean boyish man with the sad eyes and dangling cigarette, the Facel-Vega wrapped around a tree. Camus was only 46, but it wasn’t just the youth or the accomplishments or the promise of this writer that made his loss so unbearable but something singular about his presence. As Susan Sontag wrote: “Kafka arouses pity and terror, Joyce admiration. Proust and Gide respect, but no modern writer that I can think of, except Camus, has aroused love.”

For a legion of readers, Camus was a shadowy figure, however, part mystery and part myth. He evoked feelings of intimacy, but one knew little more about the man than the curriculum vitae, the friendship with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the fame. Fame came early, when, in the 1940s, the young journalist from Algeria raised a courageous voice in the Resistance newspaper Combat and then published in rapid succession a novel, “The Stranger,” a play, “Caligula,” and an essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus”--his triptych of the Absurd--and rose almost overnight to his celebrated role as “the moral conscience of his times” or, as his detractors would later call him, “Saint Just.” In the next decade, Camus produced “The Plague,” the philosophical study “The Rebel,” “The Fall,” plays, short stories and political essays, an oeuvre that in 1957 was honored with the Nobel Prize. By that time, however, Camus was in trouble, estranged from Sartre and his cohorts by their criticism of “The Rebel,” anguished over the explosion of the war in Algeria and suffering from writer’s block and his own success. On his death, he left behind only the rough beginnings of a novel titled “The First Man” and his private journals, which, when published in part in the 1960s, were remarkably devoid of personal revelations. “My whole effort has been in reality to depersonalize myself,” Camus noted in an entry. “Later on, I shall be able to speak in my own name.”

In the decades after his death, Camus was effectively forgotten by all but academicians and university students. In Herbert Lottman’s 1979 biography, “Albert Camus,” which was valiantly researched but did not enjoy full access to Camus’ family, who was still withholding his private papers, the writer remained distant, a mere actor in his own compelling story. The 1995 publication of the unfinished manuscript of “The First Man” took the world by surprise: In those unabashedly autobiographical pages, Camus’ voice was dramatically his own, fresh, unguarded and profoundly personal. The timing was propitious because, in recent years, history has turned in a way that Camus might have predicted. With the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and subsequent discrediting of totalitarianism and Algeria again in trouble, Camus’ beliefs have acquired the added weight of prescience; today, in an era stuck in egocentrism and materialism, his humanism falls on needy ears. Contrary to popular perception, Camus was not an “existentialist” (such categorizations angered him): He had no system or philosophy to sell beyond his belief in experience, reason, justice and the value of life. His view of human existence derived from something simpler and more personal.

“Poverty prevented me from believing that all is well in history and in the world,” he wrote. “The sun taught me that history is not everything.”

“The First Man,” which revisits Camus’ childhood, his humble origins and his devotion to his illiterate mother and his homeland, was a poignant introduction to the long-hidden private persona. That book reveals a figure of enduring interest, and this new and authorized biography, which is a bestseller in France, has resurrected Camus as a cultural hero.

“Albert Camus: A Life” is a magnum opus, a prodigiously researched and meticulously detailed reconstruction of the life of a writer who had many voices and wore many masks. Algerian and exile, solitary artist and political activist, moralist and irresistible charmer, Camus was an elusive subject and full of contradictions; “often a mystery to myself,” he wrote. Fiercely private and self-protective, he had a fear of biophages, biographers who devour their subjects. Olivier Todd, however, keeps an objective distance and, eschewing psychobiography and hagiography, compiles a straightforward chronological body of evidence that allows a reader to observe Camus in a sort of dailiness, to be present at the formation of his thought and his art. With first-time access to personal papers and family members, Todd adds to his almost Titanic factual chronicle Camus’ own intimate testimony, excerpted from letters, unpublished journals, the recollections of close friends and numerous lovers, as well as his work. The result is a full and insightful portrait of Camus as a man of his times and beyond.

Like an antidote to the intensity and complexity of its subject, “Camus” is organized in a casual, almost offhand manner in short punchy chapters with headings like “White Socks,” “Mosquito, You’ve Been Accepted,” “Short of Breath” and “Exodus.” The material on Camus’ early life is disappointingly spare, perhaps out of deference to “The First Man,” which describes the poverty, the sensual pleasures of the sun and the sea, the search for an identity, in searing lyric detail. The prose is deliberately unadorned. In the original, the language has a chatty contemporary quality; the story is told in the present tense. In the English, shorn of certain slangy touches and set in the past, the language is merely serviceable and unobtrusive. With a natural inevitability, Camus’ life begins to take shape on its own terms: the admiration for Andre Malraux, the success with girls, the onset of tuberculosis, a college thesis on Christian metaphysics and Neoplatonism, investigative journalism, early essays and a brief membership in the Communist Party, for which he created a worker’s theater. By 22, Camus had begun to keep a journal (“What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty,” the first entry begins); by 26, he had completed “La Mort heureuse,” the novel from which “The Stranger” would emerge; a volume of stories entitled “L’Envers et L’Endroit” and “Les Noces,” a sensually cadenced hommage to his homeland. From the beginning, a sense of tragedy and an irrepressible joy were apparent in his work, also a commitment to honesty: “Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity,” he wrote to a friend in 1936, “And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.”

This, of course, is the message of “The Stranger,” which Camus finished in wartime Paris. Like “The Myth of Sisyphus,” published the following year, it reflected his own mental anguish and physical illness from tuberculosis in his late ‘30s as well as the metaphysical dilemma of a whole era.

“Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it. I focused on the individual so much, because he seems to me insignificant and humiliated today,” Camus explained.

In Paris, with his editorship of Combat, his opposition to the purging of Nazi collaborators, his support of human rights in Algeria and his precocious and persistent anti-totalitarianism, Camus would become inextricably involved in the urgent controversies of his time. In an exhaustive revisiting of the politics and multitudinous personalities of the postwar literary scene, Todd unravels Camus’ life as a public celebrity, a solitary and struggling writer, a man of the theater, a husband and committed father and a relentless pursuer of women. Camus’ frere-ennemi relationship to the all-powerful Sartre is central to the saga for the way it illuminates the fierce intellectual partisanship of the day that, at the end of his life, isolated Camus and made him the whipping boy of both the right and the left.

With its encyclopedic information and myriad insights, “Camus” is often overwhelming as a biographical study; it would take several readings to master its contents. For the benefit of American readers, the French edition has been dramatically abridged and edited, particularly on the specifics of Camus’ position on Algerian independence. (The translator suggests that an eager reader might find more background information in the original.) What constantly relieves, enriches and impassions this dense documentary is the candid, searching and often witty testimony of Camus himself, who describes his own dreams and demons with such acuity that the book sometimes reads like “Camus” by Camus. It is telling of his sense of estrangement that his greatest love was for the Spanish actress Maria Casares, who, like Camus, was an exile from a beloved Mediterranean homeland; that even with close friends, he referred to his debilitating lung disease as “the flu”; that, like Sisyphus, he was always reinventing himself, despondently but bravely.

Of all the subtexts in “Camus”--and there are many--the most affecting is the log of the writer’s journey. Camus writes eloquently of his literary travails: “There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.” Self-confident and debonair in public, he is excruciatingly self-doubting in private. “I always choose tasks that are beyond my powers,” he wrote on completing “The Rebel.” And, embarking on “The First Man”: “I’ve written only a third of my complete works, and I’m really only starting them with this book.”

Eager for companionship, a veritable Don Juan, Camus became solitary and ascetic in quest of his work. The pleasure-seeking and asceticism were but two faces of his enduring sense of destitution, Todd concludes. Inexorably, the reader becomes intimate with the contradictory Camus. It is a tribute to the biographer that Camus’ decline in the late ‘50s is very affecting. While wearying of his angst, one feels desperate on his behalf, claustrophobic with the knowledge of his ultimate fate. It is both predictable and tragic that on the eve of his death, Camus was again renewed, with a new lover, an epic novel in progress, a new house in the country and his own repertorial theater in the works.

Perhaps the ultimate reward of “Camus” is a new understanding of Camus’ work that, despite his allegations to the contrary, was deeply informed by his life. Under Todd’s scrutiny, “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” reveal Camus’ efforts to put his life together; “The Plague,” the pain of his exile from Algeria during the war; and the plaintive monologue “The Fall,” his guilt over his infidelity to his wife and his suffering from Sartre’s attacks on his character. Even the fascinating but always cryptic journals, perceptively annotated, make new sense after reading Todd’s work. Camus, it becomes clear, was a man in search of happiness and, with all the roles his public demanded of him, philosopher, moralist, politician, guru, he was also only a writer.