2013 marks the centennial of the birth of Albert Camus, one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. Camus is often viewed as a French writer, as THE Western voice of hope and despair during an age in which the old certainties and confidence of the Gilded Age were stripped away. Perhaps no one reflected with greater clarity and honesty the "age of upheavals" that began with the shots fired at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Less well known is the fact that Albert Camus was a Middle Easterner, born and raised in Algeria, the descendent of Europeans who immigrated to Algeria in the 19th century. A member of the privileged pieds noirs minority, Camus nevertheless grew up in poverty. Given Camus's prodigeous literary output, the countless articles and books that have been written about him, and the fact that he died in an automobile accident more than a half-century ago, it is striking how much we have recently discovered about him. What made this discovery more poignant was the simultaneous tragedy of civil war that wracked his homeland of Algeria beginning in the early 1990s. The most important source of this discovery was the long-delayed 1994 publication of Camus's unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man. Having first encountered Camus when I was a college student in the 1960s, having taught English and conducted research in Algeria, and having taught courses on Algeria for decades, I found The First Man to be a Rosetta Stone that suddenly and brilliantly made the pieces of Camus's life fall together. This paper draws its material primarily from The First Man placed within the context of my long relationship with Camus's homeland of Algeria. Its main emphasis is 1) the profound way in which Camus's early years of poverty and cross-cultural interaction shaped his life-long commitment to reconciliation and justice, and 2) the traumatic impact that World War I had on his life, even as it traumatized much of the world between 1914 and 1918. This is brought out poignantly in the description of his cynical and embittered grandmother who ruled his childhood household and who lost nearly every male member of her family, including her son-in-law, Albert's father, during World War I. The quest to find Camus's lost father became a life-long winding road that resonates as much in the 21st century as it did in the 20th.