L'Etranger was published in 1942. I begin the current chapter with this bald fact not because it will come as a surprise to anyone, but because it has not been sufficiently discussed. Camus's first novel was published in occupied Paris. It is not set in mainland France, and it makes no reference to the war. However, it is hardly controversial to suggest that other French works produced during the Occupation period comment on the war even when they do not – cannot – mention it directly. Marcel Carné's film Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) depicts a medieval city visited by the Devil, and with very little effort the work can be regarded as a study in how a population responds to the temptation of evil. Henri-Georges Clouzot's great film Le Corbeau (1943) depicts a small town thrown into panic by a spate of poison pen letters. Even if the precise political position of the film is a matter of dispute, no one doubts that this situation evokes the letters of denunciation which were terrifyingly commonplace in occupied France. And Jean-Paul Sartre's play Les Mouches (1943), showing the decision to oppose tyranny with violence, so obviously alludes to the wartime situation of occupied France that it is almost embarrassing to mention it. The war is not explicitly present in any of these works; yet it would be perverse to suggest that it did not influence them profoundly.

Camus initially conceived and began work on the novel that would become L'Etranger shortly before the outbreak of war. He had abandoned work on another novel, La Mort heureuse (which would be published posthumously in 1971), in February 1939. In July 1939, while still living in Algeria, he announced that he would soon begin work on his next project. In March 1940, he moved to Paris and worked intensely on the new novel. France had been at war with Germany since the previous September, but serious hostilities had not yet broken out. On 1 May 1940, he wrote to his future wife Francine that he had finished a draft of the novel. Within days Germany would begin its major assault on Western Europe, leading to the French surrender on 22 June. Camus continued to work on his manuscript in occupied France and then back in Algeria, writing the date February 1941 at the end of the best surviving manuscript.