Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Stranger was first published in French on the 19th of May 1942 by Gallimard in Paris, under the title L'Étranger. Books reached stores from June 1942, priced at 25 francs, in an initial print run of only 4,400 copies.
The Stranger follows Meursault, a French settler in Algeria, who attends his mother's funeral without visible grief, then kills an unnamed Arab man on a beach in Algiers. In the second half, his emotional detachment at the funeral becomes the centerpiece of his murder trial, and he is sentenced to public decapitation.
British publisher Hamish Hamilton changed Stuart Gilbert's 1946 translation from The Stranger to The Outsider to avoid confusion with Maria Kuncewiczowa's novel Cudzoziemka, recently published in London as The Stranger. American publisher Knopf had already typeset the manuscript under the original title and did not make the change, so the British-American difference in titles has persisted ever since.
The Stranger embodies Camus's philosophy of absurdism: the confrontation between a human desire for meaning and a universe that provides none. Meursault's climactic insight, delivered in a rage at the prison chaplain, is that since everyone is condemned to die, nothing that precedes death ultimately matters.
The Stranger has been adapted for film three times. Luchino Visconti directed Lo Straniero in 1967, Zeki Demirkubuz directed Yazgı in 2001, and François Ozon directed L'Étranger in 2025.
Kamel Daoud published The Meursault Investigation in Algeria in 2013, telling the story from the perspective of the unnamed Arab victim's brother. Daoud gave the victim a name, Musa, and explored the aftermath of the killing after French authorities and most pied-noirs left Algeria following the Algerian War of Independence in 1962. The book was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015.