The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus’s novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It’s the rare novel that’s as at likely to be found in a teen’s backpackas in a graduate philosophy seminar. If the twentieth century produced a novel that could be called ubiquitous,The Stranger is it.How did a young man in his twenties who had never written a novel turn out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than seventy years later? WithLooking for “The Stranger”, Alice Kaplan tells that story. In the process, she reveals Camus’s achievement to have been even more impressive—and more unlikely—than even his most devoted readers knew.Born in poverty in colonial Algeria, Camus started out as a journalist covering the criminal courts. The murder trials he attended, Kaplan shows, would be a major influence on the development and themes ofThe Stranger. She follows Camus to France, and
