Remember Existentialism? I heard about it, first, back in the early 1950s on a boat full of students bound for Europe. Among the many planned daily activities was a discussion about this exciting new way of thinking. It seemed to involve, centrally, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (always in that order), and if you wanted a phrase to sum it up, "Existence precedes essence" was available—as was, with reference to Sartre's No Exit, "Hell is other people."

Sartre was more talked about than read: His philosophical masterwork Being and Nothingness was just too long. But Camus was perfect for reading, his short novel The Stranger and his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" each coming in at less than 200 pages. He was, at any rate, a better incitement to deep thought than Aristotle's De Anima or the Prior Analytics. But as a budding philosophy major, I was directed in college to Aristotle rather than Existentialism and managed not to read Camus's novel for many years, perhaps in part because I was wary of the hype generated by its extraordinary success.

Now, to tell the story of that success, we have a first-rate account by Alice Kaplan, a professor of French, rich with the intriguing details of how it all happened. Professor Kaplan is best known for an engaging memoir, French Lessons, and her writing is notable for its unpretentious clarity and vigorous life. Her claim is that no one yet "has told the story of exactly how Camus created this singular book," and to tell that story, she has brought to bear extensive research, travel, and a careful presentation of both Algeria and France during World War II ( The Stranger was published in 1942). She distinguishes her voice from the "omniscient" one of standard literary criticism; rather, she aspires to employ a "close third-person narrative," as if she were looking over Camus's shoulder and telling the story from his point of view.

The Stranger was preceded by an unpublished novel Camus wrote in the late 1930s, A Happy Death. Its protagonist, Patrice Mersault, murders a rich man, makes it look like suicide, takes his money and travels about Europe, marries, longs for a meditative, solitary life—and in an "unprepared and hurried ending" (Kaplan's words) dies of tuberculosis, a happy man. The fledgling novel was full of Mersault's thoughts about life, sex, beauty, and was provoked in part by Camus's own travels in Europe, along with other events. The result was an over-freighted creation that tried to say too much too fully. Camus sent the novel to his old teacher, Jean Grenier, who criticized it. Full of uncertainty, but still full of purpose, Camus began to write the novel that would eventually become The Stranger.

Declarations from Camus's notebooks from the time testify to the new principles he was developing for his fiction, such as "The true work of art is the one that says the least," or "To write one must fall slightly short of the expression (rather than beyond it). No chit chat." Rather than attempting, as he had done in A Happy Death, to make his hero appealing, he leaves him on his own, as it were, depriving him even of a first name while adding a "u" to his surname, Meursault.

Looking over Camus's shoulder, Kaplan fills in the scene: "As Camus worked in the silence of the hotel room, he could hear as well as see his story." By staying with Meursault's registering of things in the physical world—the sawhorses that hold up his dead mother's casket, the yelling at his dog by the old man Salamano, and in the murder scene on the beach, the Arab's knife glistening in the sun—the result was, as Kaplan sums up, "the beauty of a narrator with no interior life: the external world [taking] the place of ruminations, analyses, feelings."

The claim Kaplan makes for the revolutionary nature of the novel that finally emerged is a large one: that it changed the history of modern literature. By giving the genre of the novel a "blood transfusion," Camus turned its form outwards, "simplifying its expression and deepening its purpose." Kaplan doesn't mention Virginia Woolf, whose posthumous novel had just appeared, and who did more than any modern except Marcel Proust or James Joyce to turn the novel inwards, toward the richness and multifariousness of the inner life. Could Camus, with those writers preceding him, have "deepened" the novel's purpose by writing shorter sentences and eschewing psychological texture? Kaplan doesn't explore this question, intent as she is on conveying the excitement legions of readers felt at a new technique of fiction.

The most perceptive review of the book was by Sartre, who found that the kind of past tense Camus employed—auxiliary verb and past participle—was used to target (in Kaplan's words) "a specific moment in the past, not to describe an ongoing past." Sartre was enchanted by the way Camus's sentences were like islands, "one separated from the next by a sense of nothingness," to create an atmos-phere that was "passive, impenetrable, incommunicable, sparkling."

Camus said that the book owed a lot to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, but he might also have mentioned Ernest Hemingway, whose sentences in his early stories, and in the first-person narrative of A Farewell to Arms, often produce a comparable effect. Fishing the stream in Hemingway's great story "Big Two-Hearted River," Nick Adams is presented with third-person terseness; while in A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry watches Catherine Barkley: "We walked to the door and I saw her go in and down the hall. I liked to watch her move. She went on down the hall. I went on home."

Like the early Hemingway, Camus was able, at least in the first half of The Stranger, to stay on the surface, and because of what is not said, invite us to imagine depth—"impenetrable, incommunicable, sparkling," in Sartre's words. Kaplan shrewdly suggests that The Stranger appealed to American teachers of French who recognized that its simplicity of presentation was "a perfect bridge from language study to literature," while at the same time students could feel they were in the presence of deep thought even though, or perhaps especially because, the words and sentences stayed on the surface.

When, after World War II, the book was published here, the publicity release in Publishers Weekly was a full-page advertisement tying up the novel's content in a magic word: "There is no use trying to talk about new French literature unless you are willing to tackle 'Existentialism.' " Although Camus disavowed the Existentialist label—in fact, detested it—this failed to put off readers eager to "tackle" the mysterious new philosophy, or whatever it was. Along with its more conventional successor, The Plague, Camus's novels, supplemented by his essays published in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, led by easy stages to the Nobel Prize in 1957. Personal magnetism didn't hurt, either: His sexy appearance, with drooping cigarette and trench coat à la Humphrey Bogart, helped to do the trick.

Perhaps the most striking item, in the aftermath of The Stranger, was how criticism in the 1980s, under the influence of Edward Said, emphasized the fact that the Arab whom Meursault kills had no name and didn't speak. In his best postcolonial manner, Said charged that he and the other Arabs in the story were used merely as background for Camus's "portentous metaphysics." This political reading shifted things away from the well-worn Existentialist one. Kaplan ends with a discussion of The Meursault Investigation—a 2013 novel by an Algerian, Kamel Daoud, in which the hero, brother of the Arab killed in The Stranger, is furious that his brother was murdered and tells his story—and describes her discovery of a real-life incident that might have inspired Camus's novel.

Kaplan's aim to tell the story of how Camus created his singular book, and her tracing of the aftermath of its publication, couldn't be bettered—and as a book that looks over the novelist's shoulder and tells the story mainly from his point of view, it is absorbing. What it does not do, and what would have been worth doing, is offer some critical judgments about the novel as a work of art; not merely how its narrative works, but how valuable that "working" remains. As a historical/literary fact, The Stranger surely made a tremendous mark; the question is to what extent it remains, today, a vital piece of fiction. What, besides its skillful narrative, does it have in its favor? Certainly not humor: There is not a single instance of it in 123 pages. But does it have the resources of human feeling and wit, what T. S. Eliot called "the third dimension," found in contemporaries like William Faulkner or the later Evelyn Waugh—or to raise the stakes, in Camus's predecessor, Marcel Proust?

When The Stranger was published, A. J. Ayer praised its powers of description but suggested that it is difficult to be interested in someone uninterested in himself. That's unfair, since Meursault does become interested in his fate as a condemned man awaiting the guillotine. But Ayer has a point about a book that doesn't try for the kind of "human" interest readers expect from fiction. Perhaps the literary fate of The Stranger is a novel regarded, mainly, as a curiosity.

William H. Pritchard is the author, most recently, of Writing to Live: Commentaries on Literature and Music .