Before Dean Moriarty in On the Road and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause , there was Meursault, the nihilistic antihero of Albert Camus’ first novel, The Stranger ( L’étranger ), and one of modern culture’s original bad boys.

Both a murderer and an ungrateful son (he’s sentenced to death for the former, but only because the court believes he’s the latter), Meursault narrates the short and shattering book in a stark language of indifference, filling it with piercing observations on life in French Algeria during the late 1930s. Semi-autobiographical in one sense and despondently poetic in the other, The Stranger launched Camus’ career as a major 20th century author. Years later, it became a standard of many a school curriculum both in France and abroad.

Before Dean Moria

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