The Outsider
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First published in French in 1942 as L’Étranger, The Outsider (also known as The Stranger) is Albert Camus’s spare, unsettling portrait of a man estranged from the conventions of society. Set in French colonial Algeria, the novel follows Meursault, a young clerk whose emotional detachment becomes the focus of attention after his mother’s death and, later, a fatal encounter on a beach. As he faces trial, the court seems as concerned with his failure to display expected feelings as with the crime itself.
Through Meursault’s restrained voice and the stark precision of its prose, Camus examines the absurdity of existence, the demands of social conformity and the human search for meaning in an indifferent world. The novel also invites a difficult reckoning with the colonial society in which it is set, and with the Arab character whose death drives its central events. A defining work of twentieth-century French literature, it belongs to the philosophical current of the absurd that runs through Camus’s writing, and remains remarkable for the clarity and unsettling honesty of its vision.
From the book
“I had only a little time left and I wasn't going to waste it on God.”
— Albert Camus, The Outsider
On The Outsider
“A classic work, a work of order, composed about the absurd and against the absurd.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, “Explication de L’Étranger” (1943)