The Stranger

L'Étranger (The Stranger) is Albert Camus's landmark 1942 novel and the cornerstone of his "cycle of the absurd." Narrated in flat, unsparing first person, it follows Meursault, a French Algerian clerk who greets his mother's death, a new romance, and the ordinary business of living with the same detached indifference.

On a blinding hot beach outside Algiers, an almost arbitrary encounter ends in violence, and the second half of the book turns Meursault's life into a trial, less about the act itself than about his refusal to weep, to believe, or to pretend to feelings he does not have. Society, unable to bear a man who will not play its game, judges his character as harshly as his crime.

Spare and unsettling, the novel became a defining text of twentieth-century literature, dramatizing Camus's idea of the absurd: the collision between human beings' longing for meaning and a universe that offers none. Its famous opening lines and its unrepentant narrator have made it a fixture of classrooms and a touchstone for readers of existential and philosophical fiction.