The First Man (French: Le Premier homme) is Albert Camus' unfinished final novel.

The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, the autobiographical novel Camus was working on at the time of his death, was found in the mud at the accident site.

In a departure from the intellectual and philosophical weight of his earlier works, Camus wanted this novel to be "heavy with things and flesh."

It is a novel of basic and essential things: childhood, schooldays, the life of the body, the power of the sun and the sea, the painful love of a son for his mother, the search for a lost father.

But it is also about the history of a colonial people in a vast and not always hospitable African landscape, about the complex relationship of a "mother" country to its colonists, and about the intimate effects of war as well as political revolution.