Books

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946. First American edition of Camus' first novel and masterpiece. Octavo, original beige cloth. Near fine in a very good dust jacket, contemporary inscription to the front free endpaper, abrasion to the front panel. Jacket design by Warren Chappell. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." With the publication of this first novel L’Etranger (The Stranger), Camus introduced his lifelong attempt to reconcile a philosophy of heroic nihilism with “the ideal of human fraternity” (Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It remains one of the classic works of the twentieth century.

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.