Did Albert Camus, author of The Stranger, believe that life was meaningless?

Yes, but also
no.

Camus was an existentialist, but he was also a part of a subset of
existentialists called the absurdists.

The philosophy of
existentialism relies on the thought that life is about creating your own meaning rather than
accepting meaning from somewhere else, like tradition or authority. Of course, this leads to the
conclusion that the meaning of life will be unique to each one of us and that it will always be
subjective, rather than objectively true.

Absurdists like Camus take this a
step further while straining the existentialist idea. The core nugget of the absurdist
philosophy is that life has no inherent  meaning but that existentialism
still holds nevertheless: even though life is actually...