Looking for ‘The Stranger’: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic

Kaplan (Dreaming in French), a professor of French at Yale, persuasively retells the story of writer Albert Camus and his classic first novel, The Stranger. She explores Camus’s inspirations and influences (including James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice), themes, and distinctive writing style. She also charts the feedback he received from mentors and from literary lions such as André Malraux. The road to publication was made difficult by WWII, which created impediments such as a shortage of quality paper and German-imposed censorship. However, Camus was bolstered by the support of the French intellectual and publishing elite, who were intrigued by the emergence of a new talent from a poor neighborhood in Algiers. Most fascinating are the chapters recounting the years after The Stranger’s 1942 publication, as the novel’s popularity took it well beyond Camus’s grasp. Kaplan provides fascinating tidbits of information, such as why the novel is called The Outsider in the U.K., and explains how this seemingly simple story became a prime example of French literature to be examined, dissected, and loved by readers, students, and teachers for generations. (Oct.)