“Salinger’s only novel, ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ was published in 1951 (9 years after ‘The Stranger,’ my comment), and gradually achieved a status that made him cringe. For decades, the book was a universal rite of passage for adolescents, the manifesto of disenchanted youth. (Sometimes lethally so: after he killed John Lennon in 1980, Mark David Chapman said he had done it to promote the reading of Salinger’s book.) Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s petulant, yearning young hero, was the original angry young man, created at the very moment that American teenage culture was being born. A whole generation of rebellious youths discharged themselves into him.”

Meursault was not an angry young man.

“Meursault passes judgment on no one. He befriends the man who lives upstairs. This neighbor is not only a pimp but his mistress is an Arab. Meursault, how has just lost his mother, in one of the more ironic scenes in The Stranger consoles another neighbor who just lost his scabby dog. While everyone else seems to despise these two men, Meursault refuses to judge either.”