Complete manuscript of “The Stranger” by Albert Camus sold for more than 600 thousand euros

The price includes costs associated with the transaction, including fees and taxes, as the winning bid was 500,000 euros, France Presse reported, adding that no details about the buyer were disclosed. The auction house’s estimate ranged from 500,000 to 800,000 euros.

Although this manuscript is dated by Camus as “April 1940”, ultimately several experts cited by Tayan agree that the real date may be 1944, two years after the publication of the first edition of The Foreigner.

The first version of the novel was completed in the spring of 1940 in Paris. From this point on, the work would be rewritten, receiving a final version in September 1941 and published by Gallimard in May 1942.

According to the author’s wife, Francine Camus, the manuscript was prepared by the author in July 1944 for a bibliophile.

Some passages are “covered with erasures, additions between lines and in the margins, and dotted with arrows and cross-references.”

career
Albert Camus (1913–1960) – philosopher, novelist, playwright, journalist and essayist. He worked as a journalist in the French Resistance.

Nobel and death
The writer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, three years before he died in a tragic car accident aged just 46.

More buyers
According to Agence France-Presse, this work, now sold by an anonymous buyer, has already been put up for auction twice – in 1958 and 1991.