One of 21 copies from the deluxe issue on China paper, this copy no. 5.
Published in 1950 by Charlot, Le Minotaure is the first of the eight essays that would later form the collection L’Été (Summer).
The original manuscript is dated 1939, but publication was delayed for a number of reasons. The text did not appear in periodical form until 1946, thanks to Jean Amrouche, Camus’s Kabyle friend based in Tunis, who had been running Edmond Charlot’s journal L’Arche since the end of the war. In its February 1946 issue (no. 13), Camus published a first version of his “essay on Oran,” Le Minotaure, with the following epigraph from Gide: “Je l’imaginais à la cour du roi Minos, inquiet de savoir quelle sorte d’inavouable monstre peut bien être le Minotaure ; s’il est si affreux que cela, ou s’il n’est pas charmant peut-être.” The following year, Camus published Jean Amrouche’s Chants berbères de Kabylie with Charlot, by then established in Paris, in the “Poésie et Théâtre” series he directed, and prepared a book edition of Le Minotaure, ready by 1949, with a few corrections to the text and Gide’s epigraph replaced by one from Hölderlin.
This period marked the end of the famous Algiers imprint: the publisher who had discovered Camus in the 1930s went bankrupt despite the commercial successes of his postwar years. Le Minotaure is one of the last titles in his catalogue, and also marks the end of Camus’s collaboration with Charlot, who would nonetheless go on to launch a new publishing house in Algiers, Rivages.