The Stranger (Camus novel)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Stranger opens with one of the most discussed first sentences in modern literature: "Aujourd'hui, Maman est morte" - "Today, Maman died." Albert Camus wrote those words as the gateway to a character named Meursault, a French settler in Algeria who would kill a man on a beach, face a courtroom, and wait in a cell for the guillotine. The novella was finished by May 1941 and published in Paris on the 19th of May 1942, at a price of 25 francs, in an edition so small - only 4,400 copies - that by design it could not become a bestseller. It appeared while Nazi forces occupied France. It went on sale anyway, without a single cut demanded by the Propaganda-Staffel. What made this slight book survive occupation, cross languages, and eventually take the number one position on Le Monde's list of the 100 Books of the 20th Century? And why does a novel about indifference produce such passionate disagreement about what, exactly, its hero feels?

• 2. The Man Who Would Not Grieve

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  Meursault learns his mother has died by telegram. She had been living in an old people's home for three years before her death, as the opening lines of the novel make plain. At her vigil, he drinks white coffee rather than the black coffee the occasion demands, smokes beside her coffin, and when asked whether he wants to view her body, declines. The day after her burial, he goes swimming with a former colleague named Marie Cardona, watches a Fernandel film, and begins an intimate relationship with her. None of this is presented as rebellion. Meursault does not secretly grieve and hide it. His neighbor Salamano mentions that other people in the building had "said nasty things" about Meursault for placing his mother in a retirement home. Meursault is surprised to hear this. He had not imagined anyone judged him. A later critic, René Girard, would scrutinize this so-called indifference, questioning whether it is truly neutral or instead a very specific kind of social estrangement. Camus himself modeled Meursault partly on a real person: a close friend named Pierre Galindo, whose behavior and attitude shaped the character. Some readers have since argued that Camus may have unknowingly created one of the earliest depictions of autism in fiction.

• 3. A Letter, a Beach, a Revolver

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  Raymond Sintès, Meursault's neighbor - rumored in the building to be a pimp, though he claims to work in a warehouse - asks Meursault to write a letter designed to lure his Arab mistress back so that Raymond can humiliate her. Meursault writes the letter. He is, by his own accounting, unmoved by any concern for the woman. When Raymond later beats her, the police become involved. Meursault agrees to testify that the woman had been unfaithful, and Raymond is released with a warning. The chain of events carries forward to a beach cabin owned by a man named Masson. There, the brother of Raymond's mistress - unnamed throughout the entire novel - wounds Raymond with a knife. Later, walking alone along the beach, armed with Raymond's revolver, Meursault encounters the brother again. He is disoriented, on the edge of heatstroke, and when the man draws his knife, Meursault fires a fatal shot. Then, after a pause, he fires four more times. At his trial, the prosecuting attorney will use Meursault's behavior at his mother's funeral far more than the details of the shooting itself. The attorney portrays his quietness and passivity as evidence of a soulless monster who deserves to die. Several friends, including Raymond, Salamano, Masson, Marie, and the café owner Céleste, testify on his behalf. Meursault is sentenced to public decapitation.

• 4. The Chaplain and the Certainty of Death

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  Meursault spends close to a year in his cell before trial, sleeping and mentally cataloguing the objects in his apartment. He refuses to see the prison chaplain. The chaplain visits anyway. The conversation that follows is the moral and philosophical pivot of the whole novella. The chaplain tells Meursault that a successful appeal will not rid him of guilt or mend his relationship with a God he does not believe in. Meursault, who identifies as an atheist - or what might more precisely be called an apatheist, a person simply uninterested in the question - eventually erupts in rage. His argument is stark: since everyone will die, nothing that precedes death can ultimately matter. After the chaplain leaves, something shifts. Meursault opens his heart to what he calls the "tender indifference of the world" - the original French being "la tendre indifférence du monde" - and decides that he has been, and still is, happy. He even expresses a wish that a large, hateful crowd will attend his execution, so that the experience is complete rather than solitary. Camus described this philosophical stance as absurdism: the confrontation between a human desire for meaning and a universe that offers none. The chaplain chapter drew particular critical attention; Carl Viggiani wrote in a 1956 analysis that the novel is "a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities," and estimated that a complete accounting of its form and meaning would require a book at least as long as the novel itself.

• 5. Occupation, Tuberculosis, and 4,400 Copies

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  The publication circumstances of The Stranger were chaotic in ways Camus could not control. Revisions had been suggested by three significant figures: André Malraux, who felt the minimalist syntactic structure was too repetitive; Jean Paulhan; and Raymond Queneau. A German editor and Wehrmacht lieutenant named Gerhard Heller, working for the Censorship Bureau, offered his assistance. When the book finally appeared on the 19th of May 1942, Camus was in Oran suffering from a recurring bout of tuberculosis and could not travel to France. He missed the French publishing tradition of presenting copies to journalists in person. He could not read the first reviews in newspapers. Twenty copies were dispatched to him; none arrived. It was not until the 17th of June that Camus received a single copy of his own first novel. The following month, July 1942, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in both lungs and left Algeria for Panelier, a village near Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of south-central France. As a marketing maneuver, the title pages and rear wrappers of the original edition had been printed to create the false impression of eight different editions. There were not eight. There were 4,400 copies in total.

• 6. Crossing Languages

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  British author Stuart Gilbert produced the first English translation in 1946. His version remained the standard for more than thirty years. Publisher Hamish Hamilton changed Gilbert's title from The Stranger to The Outsider, calling it "more striking and appropriate," and also to avoid confusion with Maria Kuncewiczowa's Polish novel Cudzoziemka, which had recently appeared in London under the title The Stranger. In the United States, Knopf had already typeset the manuscript using Gilbert's original title when it learned of the British change and simply disregarded it. The British-American split in titles has never been resolved. A second British translation by Joseph Laredo appeared in 1982 through Hamish Hamilton. That same year, Kate Griffith published an American translation through the University Press of America. In 1988, Matthew Ward's translation appeared from Vintage in the United States, valued by scholars for its closer adherence to Camus's prose and his use of American idiom. Sandra Smith's 2012 translation, published by Penguin, chose the word "tender" for "tendre" in the famous closing line, arguing in her translator's note that "benign" - the word Gilbert used - "fails to capture the paradoxical nuance of 'tender'." Scholars including Helen Sebba, John E. Gale, and Eric Du Plessis have documented inaccuracies in Gilbert's translation that distort the tone of the original French. Even the first sentence has generated debate: in 2012, Ryan Bloom argued that the opening line should be rendered as "Today, Maman died," placing the time word first, as it appears in the French, to signal that Meursault lives for the moment rather than the past.

• 7. Echoes and Responses

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  Jean-Paul Sartre's 1947 article "Explication de L'Étranger" helped establish the novel's reputation among anti-Nazi circles and shaped how it was read for decades. Critics approached the text from widely different directions. Louis Hudon, in 1960, dismissed the label "existentialist." Ignace Feuerlicht in 1963 examined the theme of alienation. Leo Bersani, writing in 1970, called the novel "mediocre" in its ambitions but described it as "an impressive if flawed exercise in a kind of writing promoted by the New Novelists of the 1950s." Sergei Hackel explored parallels between the novel and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Others compared Meursault to Julien Sorel in Stendhal's The Red and the Black. In 2013, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud published The Meursault Investigation in Algeria, later reissued in France to critical acclaim. Daoud gave the unnamed Arab victim a name - Musa - and told the story from his brother's perspective, exploring what happened to the Arab characters after French authorities and most pied-noirs left Algeria following the conclusion of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962. The New York Times named it a Notable Book of 2015. The novel has also been filmed three times: Lo Straniero in 1967 by Luchino Visconti, Yazgı in 2001 by Zeki Demirkubuz, and L'Étranger in 2025 by François Ozon. In music, Robert Smith of The Cure described "Killing an Arab," the band's 1978 debut single, as "a short poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in 'l'entranger' (The Outsider) by Albert Camus." In 2023, a character named Meursault appeared in the Korean game Limbus Company, while the Russian heavy metal band Aria, on their 1995 album, set the chaplain confrontation to music from Meursault's own first-person viewpoint, including the line: "The cries of hate will be my reward / Upon my death, I will not be alone."