Moser is an assistant professor at the University of California-Davis. In the following excerpt, Moser describes The Stranger in terms of its Existential elements, Camus's philosophy of the absurd, and other viewpoints.

The Stranger is probably Albert Camus's best known and most widely read work. Originally published in French in 1942 under the title L'Etranger, it precedes other celebrated writings such as the essays The Myth of Sisyphus (1943) and The Rebel (1951), the plays Caligula (1945) and The Just Assassins (1949), and the novels The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956). Set in pre-World War II Algeria, The Stranger nevertheless confronts issues that have preoccupied intellectuals and writers of post-World War II Europe: the apparent randomness of violence and death; the emptiness of social morality in the face of an irrational world; a focus on existential and absurd aspects of the human condition. Through the singular viewpoint of the narrator Meursault, Camus presents...