Looking for the Stranger - Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (2016) is a biographical-style account of Algerian author, Albert Camus, as he is writing his famed novel, The Stranger (The Outsider), published in 1942. Kaplan describes it as the biography of the novel (rather than the novelist). The novel is one of alienation, existentialism, and the absurd. Albert Camus (1913-1960) was in his 20s, growing up in poverty, and diagnosed with tuberculosis, but excelling at school. His first job as a crime reporter set the stage for his novel. Kaplan uses the letters and diaries of Camus to reconstruct the events that lifted The Stranger from episodic influences to words on the page. Camus had the opening sentences since August 1938 and didn’t change a word. Yet his writing policy was to edit, edit, and edit again. In 1939, it was not exactly peace-time, but neither was it war-time. Algiers was under German occupation and censorship. And Camus had a cer...