Albert camus new biography the stranger

  • Looking for the Stranger is a biographical-style account of Algerian author, Albert Camus, as he is writing his famed novel, The Stranger (The Outsider).
  • Looking for the Stranger engagingly connects the dots between the novel and Camus's life.
  • Born in poverty in colonial Algeria, Camus started out as a journalist covering the criminal courts.

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    “The Stranger,” Albert Camus’ classic novel, which is about to celebrate its 75th anniversary in print, almost wasn’t published. Alice Kaplan, the John M. Musser Professor of French, recounts this near miss in her most recent book “Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic,” which is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

    “The Stranger” is for many Americans the first book that they read in French in high school, notes Kaplan, adding that she first read the book as a teenager at French summer camp, and has read it many times in the years since — and that, in part, is what prompted her to write her latest book. Kaplan says that it wasn’t until the 1980s when she became a professor that she realized that she had never been taught anything about the Algerian context of “The Stranger,” and that she was scarcely aware that the book was set in Algeria. “This seemed scandalous to me and I wanted to repair that,” she says.

    “Looking f

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    REVIEW: An Engaging, Investigative Look at Albert Camus's "The Stranger"

    Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan
    University of Chicago Press,  288 pp.
     
    By Madeleine Dobie

    In the spring of 1946, Albert Camus visited New York City. Riding a wave of celebrity propelled by his ställning eller tillstånd as editor of the Resistance journal Combat, the French writer spoke to packed halls of students and intellectuals, eager for a taste of the latest currents in French culture. To cement this triumph, the first English translation of his novel The Stranger was published, in dual American and British editions, during his stay in New York.

    In her much-anticipated book, Looking for the Stranger, Alice Kaplan, a professor of French at Yale, embarks on a fascinating quest for the sources of Camus’s celebrated novel. She hunts for clues, not only in the author’s notebooks and correspondence, but also in the popular books and movies of the per

  • albert camus new biography the stranger

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    The American existentialist philosopher Robert C. Solomon once said of Albert Camus’s The Stranger: “It marked, when I first read it in high school, one of those ‘existential’ turning points in my life.”

    How many readers of Camus’s novel would say the same? I, for one, when I first read Stuart Gilbert’s English translation in high school. Gilbert’s translation has numerous flaws, and has since been supplanted by Matthew Ward’s, but as Alice Kaplan argues in her outstanding new book Looking for ‘The Stranger’: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, “by some miracle of literary transmission, the many problems with the Gilbert translation did not stand in the way of English-speaking readers grasping what was essential about The Stranger, and the force of the original came through, allowing the novel to take hold.”

    Its hold continues to this day, more than 70 years after its original publicat