Strange manuscript of ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus up for auction

A handwritten manuscript of classic French novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus goes up for auction on Wednesday. The unique item appears to have been drafted after the book was published.

The 104-page manuscript is expected to reach between €500,000 and €800,000 at the Tajan auction house in Paris.

Manuscripts are normally written as the first draft before being edited and published. Camus put the date of April 1940 on the particular draft, suggesting it was finished some two years before “The Stranger”, also known in English as “The Outsider”, was published.

Another signed manuscript exists

But a number of clues indicate this was a light-hearten fake, since another signed manuscript also exists.

The manuscript is full of jokey sketches, remarks and subtle annotations. An expert who studied it in later years said it had actually been put together in 1944 a view reportedly confirmed to him by Camus’s widow.

With Paris under Nazi occupation at the time, it may have been a way of raising desperately needed funds by creating a handwritten copy for a wealthy fan.

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“Its history and precise dating are mysterious, as is the progress of this strange novel,” the auction house says in its notes.

The identity of the first buyer is unknown. It was later sold at auction twice in 1958 and 1991.

“The Stranger” had an initial print run of 4,400 copies, but quickly became a bestseller and then a classic of French literature, selling millions of copies.

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Considered a key text in the existentialist movement, it recounts the story of a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab man for reasons that remain unclear.