When a boat carrying Albert Camus sailed into New York Harbor in March 1946, he was hailed as a moral emissary from war-ravaged Europe and the glamorous embodiment of a newfangled philosophy known as Existentialism.

The American publication of his novel “The Stranger” was celebrated on the roof of the Hotel Astor, and Vogue published a portrait by Cecil Beaton, showing Camus smiling slyly from noirish shadows.

But a year later, Camus recalled his three months amid the city’s “swarming lights” and frantic streets with a mixture of awe and bafflement.

“I have my ideas about other cities but about New York only these powerful and fleeting emotions,” he wrote in 1947. “I still know nothing about New York, whether one moves among madmen here or among the most reasonable people in the world.”