Looking for the Stranger

Albert Camus's The Stranger is one of the most widely read works of modern literature, the all-time best-selling novel in France, and a rite of passage for people around the world. Here, for the first time, the novel receives its own biography--an absorbing account of a great work's inception, struggle to be published, and ultimate triumph. Critics have written exhaustively about The Stranger but have taken its very existence for granted. Meanwhile, biographies of Camus have focused on the man, not his novel. Alice Kaplan is the first to tell the story of exactly how Camus created this singular book, how it came to be published in France during the Nazi occupation, and how it was launched on its journey to classic status. An unknown writer from Algeria, born into poverty, raised by a deaf-mute mother, Albert Camus managed to place his first novel with Gallimard, the most prestigious French publishing house, when he was not yet thirty years old. It was published at the very worst time for France and for the enterprise of French publishing. How did Camus do it? Kaplan connects the images and scenes of the novel to Camus's daily life as a court reporter, to his discovery of American literature, and to his experience with colonialism. She introduces us to Camus's teachers, his literary mentors, his publishers, his lovers, family, and friends, and we follow him as unemployment, war, and illness push him from Algeria to Paris and back again. We accompany him to New York in 1946, where he travels for the publication of the first English translation of the novel by Alfred and Blanche Knopf, and where he is welcomed as a hero of the French Resistance and followed by the FBI. At the end of her narrative, Kaplan returns to Algeria to investigate a violent 1939 episode that inspired the murder in The Stranger. In an astonishing discovery, she identifies the Arab man involved--and gives Meursault's famously nameless victim a name.