| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780394533056 | | Publisher: A. A. Knopf | | Publish Date: 3/1/1988 | | Buy.com Sku: 30059276 | | Item#: RR2VFC | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 106388 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.8H x 5.4L x 0.75T |
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| | | Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus was exploring what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."
Now, in an illuminating new American translation (the only English version available for more than forty years was done by a British translator), the original intent of The Stranger is made more immediate, as Matthew Ward captures in exact and lucid language precisely what Camus said and how he said it, thus giving this haunting novel a new life for generations to come.
Albert Camus, son of a working-class family, was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at Various jobs -- in the weather bureau, in an automobile-accessory firm, in a shipping company -- to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to journalism as a career. His report on the unhappy state of the Muslims of the Kabylie region aroused the Algerian government to action and brought him public notice. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the Theatre de L'Equipe, a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, Dostoevski, and others. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of Combat, then an important underground newspaper. Camus was always very active in the theater, and several of his plays have been published and produced. His fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and theKingdom; his philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel; and his plays have assured his preeminent position in modern French letters. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures of the Western world when he was at the very summit of his powers.
Annotation:
In this stylistically simple, first-person tale 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." Through Meursault, Camus portrays a man who rejects the beliefs and life styles imposed on him by society. The events that lead to his execution only serve to reinforce his feelings of utter isolation. A classic existentialist work, the novel influenced many of Camus's contemporaries, including Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute.
| Praise(unknown)
"Story--the man who refuses to justify himself. Other people prefer their idea of him. He dies, alone in his awareness of what he really is." - Albert CamusWashington Post Book World
"From its famous first sentence, 'Mother died today,' to its amazing finale, this short novel is suffused throughout by the harsh glare of the Algerian summer." - Michael Dirda 08/20/1995 |
| Author Bio| Albert Camus | | Albert Camus was the younger of two brothers. His mother was an illiterate charwoman, his father an itinerant agricultural worker who was killed in World War I. In 1923, Camus won a scholarship to the lyc?e in Algiers, where he studied from 1924 to 1932 and began to suffer from the incipient tuberculosis that was to plague him all his life. Already a writer of some renown in Algeria, Camus moved to Paris in 1938, where he worked in theater and publishing and as a journalist for various newspapers. In 1939 he was divorced from his first wife, Simone Hi?, who was a morphine addict. He married Francine Faur? in 1940 and published his first novel, THE STRANGER, in 1946. An existentialist who became known as "the conscience of his nation," Camus set out to capture the absurdity of life and the innate meaninglessness of the world. He was heavily influenced by the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche and was closely linked to fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, but he broke with him over Sartre's support of Stalinist politics. Camus was member of the French resistance during World War II. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957 and died in an automobile accident near Sens, France in 1960. |
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