Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913, to a family that could not afford books. His father, a vineyard worker, was killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914 when Camus was less than a year old. His mother was illiterate and partially deaf, working as a cleaning woman in Algiers. A primary school teacher named Louis Germain noticed the boy's intelligence, gave him extra lessons, and helped him win a scholarship to the lycee. Camus acknowledged Germain in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1957, dedicating the prize to the teacher who had changed his life. His early career was split between journalism and theater in Algiers, where he wrote for the resistance newspaper Combat during the German occupation and produced his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942. The novel's opening line, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure," announced a writer for whom the absurdity of existence was not an intellectual exercise but a lived reality. He developed the philosophy of absurdism in The Myth of Sisyphus, arguing that the only serious philosophical question was whether life was worth living, and concluding that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. His rupture with Jean-Paul Sartre over communism in the early 1950s divided the French intellectual left and cost Camus friendships that never recovered. He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 at forty-four, the second-youngest recipient in literature. Three years later he died in a car accident on a French country road on January 4, 1960, at forty-six. Unused train tickets were found in his pocket. He had changed his travel plans at the last minute. An unfinished autobiographical novel, The First Man, was found in the wreckage.