Help with "The Stranger" by Albert Camus?

Question:

Help with "The Stranger" by Albert Camus?

What is the genre and literary period of "The Stranger"? What information do you have about these two things?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: "The Stranger" - not a great translation of the title ("L'Etranger" in French), which might also mean "The Outsider," "The Alienated," etc. - was written in 1942, if my memory is correct.
It is usually classified as Existentialism and its author, Albert Camus, as an Existentialist, but neither is quite accurate. The most representative of Camus' novels, I would say, is "The Plague," which shows a more optimistic view.
"The Stranger" was hot stuff when it was first published, and all the literature majors read it in college at least until about 1980. Those people are your teachers now, so that's why it still gets assigned even though it is now 65 years old.
Existentialism was a literary and philosophical movement descended from the Romantics. It started with Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Heidegger, and (some say) Nietzsche.
Its primary tenet is that "existence precedes essence," meaning that there are no universal values at the time one enters the universe, and one's free will determines the meaning of one's life. Thus the Existentialist lives in a state of constant tension and uncertainty.
The movement began to lose influence by the 1970s, when it started running out of fresh ideas and was reduced to Jean-Paul Sartre and others arguing about whether Existentialism is or is not a humanism.