The Outsider (First Edition)

CAMUS, Albert. The Outsider. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Introduction by Cyril Connolly. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946.

Small 8vo. Original grey-green cloth. Spine lettered in gilt. Pictorial dust jacket designed by Edward Bawden, unclipped (priced 6s. net). [ii], 104 pp. First edition in English. First impression. Precedes the American edition published by Knopf. Connolly 94B.

L'Étranger was first published by Gallimard in German-occupied Paris in 1942, written by a twenty-eight-year-old Algerian-born writer who was then largely unknown. By the time Hamish Hamilton published this first English edition in 1946, Camus had joined the French Resistance and served as editor of the clandestine newspaper Combat. The novel arrived into English already carrying considerable weight.

The story is one of the most widely read of the twentieth century: Meursault, a French Algerian clerk, attends his mother's funeral without apparent grief, drifts into a love affair, becomes entangled in a friend's dispute, and kills an Arab man on a beach in blazing sun — an act he is subsequently unable to explain to anyone's satisfaction, including his own. The trial that follows condemns him less for the killing than for his refusal to perform the emotions society requires of him. Camus described this as a philosophy of the absurd: the confrontation between man's need for meaning and the universe's total silence on the subject. Le Monde ranked the novel first on its list of the 100 Books of the Century.

This Hamish Hamilton edition is the first appearance of the novel in English. Stuart Gilbert's translation held the field for thirty years. The introduction by Cyril Connolly, who also included the book in his 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement, is not present in the American edition. Edward Bawden's dust jacket design, characteristically spare and striking, depicts the Arab victim rather than the protagonist — an unusual decision for commercial publishing of the period, and one that remains quietly provocative.

Near fine in good dust jacket. Jacket unclipped; some wear to extremities.

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