Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His two collections of essays, Pour Marx (1965) and Lire de Capital (1965), deeply influenced Marxist thought in the West. When Marx's early writings inspired a number of New Left thinkers—especially his analysis of alienation in capitalist society—Althusser focused on the mature Marx. Althusser's career virtually ended in 1980 after he murdered his wife. He was declared unfit to stand trial and institutionalized until 1983. During the last, tragic period of his life, Althusser wrote two versions of his autobiography, Les Faits (1992) and L'Avenir diure Longtemps (1992). His other books include Reading CAPITAL (with Etienne Balibar, 1970), Essays in Ideology (1971), Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx (1972), and Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1990). (some information from Pegasos, literature related resource site originating in Finland)