Books

Paris: Gallimard, 1942. First edition. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF ONE OF THE DEFINING NOVELS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. "From its cold opening lines, 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure,' to its bleak concluding image of a public execution set to take place beneath the 'benign indifference of the universe,' Camus's first and most famous novel takes the form of a terse, flat, first-person narrative by its main character Meursault, a very ordinary young man of unremarkable habits and unemotional affect who, inexplicably and in an almost absent-minded way, kills an Arab and then is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The neutral style of the novel-typical of what the critic Roland Barthes called 'writing degree zero'-serves as a perfect vehicle for the descriptions and commentary of its anti-hero narrator, the ultimate 'outsider' and a person who seems to observe everything, including his own life, with almost pathological detachment" (David…

L'Etranger (The Stranger) is a novel by French author Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus's philosophy of the absurd and existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label.

Identifying a first edition of 'L'Etranger' would involve checking the publisher (Gallimard), publication date, and often specific details like errors or typesetting details that were corrected in later editions.