1 - Contexts

Summary

Biographical sketch

When The Stranger was published in 1942 Albert Camus was 29 years old. He was born a year before the outbreak of the First World War and his father was killed in the early battles. A semi-autobiographical essay recounts that Camus's mother kept a piece of the shell that had been taken from her husband's body and exhibited his medals in their living-room. Unsurprisingly, Camus grew up with a horror of war that led him to oppose French re-armament throughout the 1930s. The psychological effects of his father's death are harder to explain, but in his life Camus sought the friendship of older men like Jean Grenier and Pascal Pia, while in The Stranger the father makes one intriguing appearance.

The young Camus was drawn all the closer to his mother who brought him up in the working-class Algiers district of Belcourt where she earned her living cleaning houses. Uneducated, overworked and withdrawn, Catherine Sintès was a complex influence on her son. In his public statements Camus insisted on his attachment to her, declaring that he wished to place at the centre of his writing her ‘admirable silence’ (Preface to Betwixt and Between, OC 2,13). This silence was a sign of stoicism, a rudimentary form of the indifference that is a key concept in his writing, and a warning against the falsity inherent in literary discourse.