This is the last version of the text that Wright prepared without external intervention by his publisher. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of this work, including typescripts, proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University and in the Harper and Brothers archive in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. Wright began making notes for the novel that became The Outsider in 1948 while living in Paris. In February 1952 he went to England to do intensive work on the manuscript, and by April or May he had finished a first draft and sent it to his agent, Paul Reynolds, who suggested some revisions. Wright sent him a second typescript in July (now in the Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Library, catalogued as JWJ Wright #854). Reynolds then had the revised typescript delivered to Jack Fischer, who had replaced Edward Aswell as Wright’s editor at Harper and Brothers when Aswell left the firm.
