Dréan

A small farming settlement in colonial Algeria, then called Mondovi, where Albert Camus was born in 1913 into poverty so complete that his mother was illiterate and partially deaf, the sun and the poverty of this place never left his writing.

Drean was a colonial farming settlement in eastern Algeria, then called Mondovi, laid out for European settlers on land taken from Algerians. Camus was born there in 1913 and his father was dead in the fighting on the Marne within a year. He was raised in a working-class quarter of Algiers by an illiterate mother and a hard grandmother, in rooms without books, and got out because a teacher pushed him toward a scholarship. The light and the poverty of that country are in everything he wrote.