19:T554,

Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and

activist, Jean-Paul Sartre was also—and perhaps above all—a

great essayist. The essay was uniquely suited to Sartre because

of its intrinsically provisional and open-ended character. It is

the perfect form in which to dramatize the existential character

of our deepest intellectual, artistic, and political commitments.

This new selection of Sartre’s essays, the first in English to

draw on the entire ten volumes of his collected essays as well

as previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily

searching appreciations of such writers and artists as Faulkner,

Bataille, and Giacometti; Sartre’s great address to the French

people at the end of the occupation, “The Republic of Silence”;

sketches of the United States from his visit in the 1940s;

reflections on politics that are both incisive and incendiary;

portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning

with his own career from one of the interviews that ill-health

made his prime mode of communication late in life. Together

they add up to an unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and

sometimes reckless thinker and writer and his contentious, difficult

but never less than interesting times.

1a:T465,

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, La Naus?e (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key novel of the twentieth century and a landmark in Existentialist fiction. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time -- the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to come to terms with life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed.