Publication of The Stranger

The Stranger, in French L'Etranger, is a short novel by Albert Camus, published in Paris in 1942 while France was under German occupation. It is narrated by Meursault, a clerk in French-ruled Algiers who shows little emotion at his mother's funeral and later kills a man on a beach. The first part tells the events, and the second his trial, in which he is condemned as much for his indifference to social conventions as for the crime. The novel is a leading example of the philosophy of the absurd, which Camus developed in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published the same year. Camus received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. The book's English title has also appeared as The Outsider.

Open on the timeline