The Stranger
A man kills someone on a beach and feels nothing. His real crime, the court decides, is not caring enough.
Outside the World
Albert Camus's 1942 masterpiece follows Meursault, a detached French Algerian who buries his mother without grief, begins a romance without love, and kills an Arab man under the blinding Algerian sun without apparent motive. At his trial, the prosecution is less concerned with the murder than with his emotional coldness. The novel is a razor-sharp indictment of a society that punishes outsiders for failing to perform the correct feelings.
Reading The Stranger
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"I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
"Albert Camus
Camus wrote The Stranger in the first person to keep the reader as disoriented as Meursault himself. He completed it when he was 27, while also writing The Myth of Sisyphus as its philosophical companion.
The novel became foundational to the existentialist and absurdist movements and has sold tens of millions of copies. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960 at age 46.