The first of two companion volumes on anabelian algebraic geometry, this book contains the famous, but hitherto unpublished manuscript ‘Esquisse d’un Programme’ (Sketch of a Program) by Alexander Grothendieck. This work, written in 1984, fourteen years after his retirement from public life in mathematics, together with the closely connected letter to Gerd Faltings, dating from 1983 and also published for the first time in this volume, describe a powerful program of future mathematics, unifying aspects of geometry and arithmetic via the central point of moduli spaces of curves; it is written in an artistic and informal style. The book also contains several articles on subjects directly related to the ideas explored in the manuscripts; these are surveys of mathematics due to Grothendieck, explanations of points raised in the Esquisse, and surveys on progress in the domains described there.