The Outsider by Albert Camus first edition 1946

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946 
 
8vo., grey-green cloth, with backstrip lined and lettered in gilt; the iconic dust jacket featuring a design by Edward Bawden (6s. net, unclipped); pp. [iv], 3-103, [iii]; a very good copy with mild compression to spine tips and one small scratch to the lower board; a few light spots throughout, but otherwise clean; dust jacket retaining much of its brightness, with the lower panel and dirtied; tips of folds chipped, with foot of front flap creased, leading to an open tear approximately 2.5cm in length; and another large chip to head of spine resulting in a little loss to the author’s name, running to a closed tear approximately 3.5cm in length, discreetly repaired to verso with archival tape. 
 
First UK edition, originally published in France in 1942. Here, the translation has been performed by Stuart Gilbert, with an introduction by Cyril Connolly. 
 
The first work by Albert Camus to be published in his lifetime, with the plot following a man called Meursault who, weeks after his mother’s funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers. The controversial dust wrapper, conceived of by the official war artist Edward Bawden, moved away from the typically commercial covers of its time to instead portray the murdered man, and not the psychologically disturbed protagonist. The opening line, ‘mother died today’ also remains controversial. Although the translator, Stuart Gilbert, was a friend of Joyce, and his rendering of Camus’ masterpiece into English was used for the next 30 years, many scholars have criticised inaccuracies in the translation and the resulting distortions of the tone from Camus' original French text. 
 
Camus himself was born in Algeria, and studied Philosophy at the University of Algiers. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Camus was in Paris, and in the process of writing The Outsider (L’Etranger, literally translating as ‘The Stranger’, the name was changed to avoid confusion with the translation of Maria Kuncewiczowa's novel of the same name). He went on to join the French Resistance, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Combat, an outlawed newspaper, during the war. 
 
Often compared to his friend and Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, the literary critic Cyril Connolly writes in his introduction that the philosophy of Camus should not be viewed as gloomy existentialism. Instead, it “is a Philosophy of the absurd, and for him the absurd springs from the relation of man to the world, of his legitimate aspirations to the vanity and futility of human wishes. The conclusions which he draws from it are those of classical pessimism.” He concludes “The Outsider is only a stage… it is not enough to love life, we must teach everyone else to love it.”  
 
Increasingly scarce in the fragile wrapper.