
“A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” - The Wall Street Journal

The inadequacy of religion or logic to account for such horrors helped inspire his own philosophy of Absurdism, whose ideas are reflected throughout The Stranger.Īn Existential Novel? Though The Stranger is often categorized as an existential novel, Camus himself rejected this label. Though he fought passionately for the French Resistance against the Germans, Camus lived amidst widespread fear that the senseless horrors of World War I would be repeated. By the time he wrote The Stranger in the early 1940s, World War II had begun and the Nazi regime occupied France, where Camus had recently moved from Algeria.

Born during World War I, Camus lost his father to the fighting and grew up to be an integral member of the Lost Generation. In the wake of the war rose the Lost Generation, a group of artists who addressed the collapse of traditional structures of meaning-both secular and religious-and conveyed their sense of life’s meaninglessness.

Fought between 19, World War I introduced the world to unprecedented violence and gave rise to a new sense of disaffection and doubt, producing art very different than the art of the past.
