Sartre

By David Drake

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) dominated the cultural and literary life of post-war France. He believed from an early age that he had a mission to be a writer and proceeded to realise this as a novelist, philosopher, screenwriter, playwright, literary and art critic, biographer, essayist, polemicist and journalist. Although before the Second World War Sartre showed little inclination to become involved in politics, from 1945 he established himself as the very personification of intellectual commitment, taking public positions on national and international political issues from the Liberation until very shortly before his death.

        In this new biography, published by Haus to mark the centenary of Sartre’s birth, David Drake considers the works of France’s most famous 20th century intellectual, his relations with his contemporaries, notably his life-long companion Simone de Beauvoir, fellow novelist and playwright Albert Camus and sociologist Raymond Aron, and the political causes he espoused, all of which the author firmly locates in the turbulent times through which Sartre lived.

‘It helps the reader understand where, under particular historical and political pressures, intellectuals in a certain tradition went wrong, or got things right. It offers a measured and detailed summary of the ways in which Sartre, his allies, their opponents and some of their successors intervened in political debates, from the purge of collaborators after liberation up to the attempted purge of sans papiers in the 1990s.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Published to coincide with the centenary of Sartre’s birth in 1905, this readable brief study affords a persuasive account of the man and the writer, in precisely the terms of the series to which it belongs, Life and Times: the basic narrative is structured biographically, with clear, informative amplification providing the political and intellectual context, reinforced by a tabulated chronology and a rigorously selective bibliography.
 Drake . . . succeeds in providing a first-rate introduction for the general reader, secure in its analyses and balanced in its overview.’

Professor Richard Parrish, Times Higher Education Supplement

David Drake, Principal Lecturer in French at Middlesex University, London, is President of the United Kingdom Society for Sartrean Studies (UKSSS) and a member of the Editorial Board of Sartre Studies International and of Modern and Contemporary France.

Contents: Introduction - Early Years (1905-1924) - From the École Normale to the Outbreak of the War (1924-1939) - The War Really Divided My Life in Two (1939-1944)- Existentialism and Communism (1944-1950) -An Anticommunist is a Rat (1950-1956) - Marxism and Anti-colonialism(1956-1967) - May 1968, Maoism and Flaubert (1967-1980) - Conclusion - Notes - Chronology - Further Reading – Index