The Stranger

L'Étranger · published 1942 · ISBN 9780679720201

Albert Camus — Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) — France (born in Algeria), writing in French. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

“for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Albert Camus

French-Algerian writer and philosopher, bound up with the philosophy of the absurd. One of the most widely read French authors of the twentieth century and the second-youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

How it came to be

Published in 1942 in the midst of the Second World War, the book crystallizes the philosophy of the absurd that Camus developed in parallel in his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus." Its bare, indifferent voice helped shape a whole modern style of writing.

What The Stranger is about

Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, is unmoved at his mother's funeral and then, one blinding noon, shoots a man dead on a beach. In the end the court condemns him less for the killing than for the coldness with which he refuses to play along with social convention.

Analysis & legacy

The Stranger is a doorway into Camus's philosophy of the absurd: a universe that stays silent before the human hunger for meaning. Meursault is condemned less for the gunshot than for refusing to perform the emotions society demands of him; he would rather tell the truth to the point of death than pretend. Its bare, indifferent voice and short sentences under a harsh Mediterranean sun helped define a whole modern manner of writing. Published in 1942 alongside the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," the book became one of the most read and debated French novels of the twentieth century, and topped Le Monde's list of the "100 Books of the Century."

Themes: Absurdism · Alienation · Honesty · Death · Society and judgment

Rating: 4.1/5 from 129 ratings (Open Library).

What critics say

• One of the most widely read French novels of the twentieth century, Albert Camus's L'Étranger, carries, for American readers, enormous significance in our cultural understanding of midcentury French identity. — Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books
• Placed first on Le Monde's list of the 100 best books of the twentieth century. — Le Monde, "100 Books of the Century"

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