Books by Jean Paul Sartre

Sartre's closest friend examines the last years of his life and presents a conversation between herself and Sartre which touches upon subjects including the origins of his philosophy, the conviction behind his activism, and the inspiration for his fiction.

Set in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton.

'Still a monument of postwar writing on anti-Semitism....Michael Walzer's fine introduction will help current readers sift out what remains relevant form Sartre's work for considering the variants of antisemitism haunting the world today.' Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Sartre's study of Baudelaire is one of the more brilliant achievements of modern criticism. He turned abstractions like Existence and Being, Freedom and Nature, into a theory of psychoanalysis, grounded in man's creativity and opposed to Freudian determinism. Then he put the theory into practice in this book on Baudelaire.

Published in 1943, "Being and Nothingness" is recognized as a central work of existentialism. This monumental study of the human condition--which many have viewed as a philosophical response to the horrors of World War II--deals with love, hate, sex, anguish, and a great many other themes. According to Sartre, "man is the being by whom Nothingness comes into the world."

Essays written since 1960 examine key aspects, events, and figures of world politics, philosophy, poetry, painting, and psychoanalysis, and the purposes and processes of Sartre's own writing.

"Sartre is a true post-colonial pioneer. His ethical and political struggle against all forms of oppression and exploitation speak to the problems of our own times with a rare courage and cogency."
Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature Harvard University
Nearly forty years after its first publication in French, this collection of Sartre's writings on colonialism remains a supremely powerful, and relevant, polemical work. Over a series of thirteen essays Sartre brings the full force of his remarkable intellect relentlessly to bear on his own country's conduct in Algeria, and by extension, the West's conduct in the Third World in general. The tussle is not equal, and the western imperialists emerge at the end, bloody, bruised and thoroughly chastened. Most startling of all is Sartre's advocacy of violence as a legitimate response to repression, motivated by his belief that freedom was the central characteristic of being human. Whether one agrees with his every

This is the first time Sartre's classic work on colonialism has been made available in English. First published in French in 1964, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It had an important impact on the conduct of the Algerian war itself, and the break up of the French colonial empire cannot be understood without reference to this key text. In this respect, it is also famous for its controversial call for the use of violence in achieving political ends.

Colonialism and Neo Colonialsim has Sartre's preface to Wretched of the Earth and has inspired many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

Presents both versions of the screenplay John Huston commissioned Sartre to write about Freud and discusses the background of the work.

In March of 1980, just a month before Sartre's death, "Le Nouvel Observateur" published a series of interviews between the blind and debilitated philosopher and his young assistant, Benny Levy. Scandalized readers denounced the interviews as distorted, inauthentic, even fraudulent; they portrayed a Sartre who seemed to have abandoned his leftist convictions and rejected his most intimate friends. Shortly before his death, Sartre confirmed the authenticity of the interviews and their puzzling content. Presented in this fresh, meticulous translation, the interviews are framed by two provocative essays from Benny Levy himself, accompanied by an introduction by Sartre authority Ronald Aronson.

Huis Clos is designed primarily for use by intermediate French classes, it can be used, in class or out, at any level of college and university instruction in French.

First published in 1940, Sartre's The Imaginary is a cornerstone of his philosophy. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the "intentionality of consciousness" as a key to the puzzle of existence.
Against this background, The Imaginary crystallized Sartre's worldview and artistic vision. Here he presented the first extended examination of the concepts of nothingness and freedom, both of which are derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects both as they are and as they are not. These ideas would drive Sartre's existentialism and his entire theory of human freedom, laying the foundation for his masterwork Being and Nothingness three years later. This new translation by Jonathan Webber rectifies flaws in the terminology of the first translation and recaptures the essence of Sartre's phenomenology. Webber's perceptive new introduction helps to decipher this challenging, seminal work, placing it in the context of the author's work and the history of philosophy.

The founder of French existentialism delineates the relationship between man's freedom of choice and his desires and abilities to create works of literature.

Sartre's first novel focuses on Antoine Roquentin, an introspective historian who undergoes an existential crisis. Roquentin loses confidence in established values of ordinary life. His recognition of the absurdity of life precipitates problems in all his relationships, including his relationship with himself. Roquentin records the shifts in his perceptions and the struggle to restore meaning to his life in a continuous present, free of lies. Besieged by metaphysical doubts, he tries to cleanse himself of "the sin of existing." The physical manifestation of his angst is nausea. "Nausea" is one of the central texts of 20th-century existentialism.

4 plays about an existential portrayal of Hell, the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict and an arresting attack on American racism.

The complexity and power of human nature is the focus of these two plays by the French existentialist.

In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here for the first time in English, Notebooks for an Ethics is Sartre's attempt to articulate a moral philosophy. In the Notebooks he addresses any number of themes and topics relevant to an effort to formulate a concrete and revolutionary socialist ethics, among them the differences between force and violence, the relationship of means and ends, and the relationship of oppression and alienation. Most important, he tries to show that there can be an authentic mutual recognition among free individuals where no one steals another's freedom. While remaining committed to the basic principles of Being and Nothingness, Sartre here seeks to locate the foundation for action in history and society. The Notebooks thus form an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre grapples anew with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. In dealing with fundamental modes of relating to the Other, among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt, he highlights the notions of conversion and creation as they figure in the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two appendixes, one on "the good and subjectivity", the other on the problem of blacks in theUnited States as a case study of oppression.

'Our Lady of the Flowers', which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. the exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.

This unique selection presents the essential elements of Sartre's lifework -- organized systematically and made available in one volume for the first time in any language.

A collection of letters by the author of Being and Nothingness depicts Sartre as a soldier, a prisoner of the Germans, and a man of Resistance and charts his path to fame with the publication of his major works.

The French novelist, playwright, and poet is portrayed as the perfect Existential Man in this exhaustive work of criticism.

'Search for a Method' is a separate and introductory essay published together with 'Critique of Dialectical Reason'. It is the search for a method by which the existentialist Marxist may hope to understand both individual persons and history.

"A driving force in all Sartre's writing is his serious desire to change the life of his reader." -- Iris Murdoch

The Transcendence of the Ego, first published in France in 1937, may be regarded as a turning point in the philosophical development of Jean-Paul Sartre. Before writing this essay, Sartre had become intimately acquainted with phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In this critically significant essay, Sartre attacked Husserl's notion of a transcendental ego. This disagreement with Husserl was profoundly important for Sartre, and it facilitated his transition from phenomenology to the doctrine of Being and Nothingness.

Powerfully depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished response of the French people to the German occupation. Translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins.

At long last, Truth and Existence allows us to read Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of knowing and truth. This brilliant epistemological sequel to Being and Nothingness was found among Sartre's unpublished manuscripts by his adoptive daughter and executor, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre. Posthumously published in France in 1989, the work dates to 1948, shortly after Sartre's controversial call for the writer's political commitment and his celebrated public lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism". Truth and Existence, written in response to Martin Heidegger's The Essence of Truth, is a product of the years when Sartre was reaching full stature as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist. This brief, coherent, and engaging text presents Sartre's ontology of truth in terms of his characteristic key moral questions of freedom, action, and bad faith. While stressing the intuitive and personal dimensions of truth, Truth and Existence also explores the argument that ignoring is an intentional act starting, like all knowledge, from the primary ontological condition of ignorance. Thus, at the heart of Sartre's discussion are explanations of ignorance (as resulting from the choice to ignore), phenomenological descriptions (of behavior seeking to avoid the truth), and the reasons why one chooses to avoid the truth. Sartre explores why one Madame T., afflicted with tuberculosis, should choose to ignore the disease that is killing her rather than take responsibility for it. Here is Sartre the existentialist at his most original and most provocative: this work of epistemology, based on ontology, becomes a work of ethics. At the same time, Truth and Existence foreshadows and lays thebasis for some of the most important insights of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Truth and Existence is introduced by an extended biographical, historical, and analytical essay by Ronald Aronson.

During the phony war, the young Sartre made use of his spare time to make a series of notes on philosophy, literature, politics, history and autobiography which anticipate the themes this later masterpieces, and often surpass them in literary verve and directness.

Diaries recount Sartre's experiences as a mobilized reservist and express his feelings about philosophy, literary criticism, and the politics of the time.

Diaries recount Sartre's experiences as a mobilized reservist and express his feelings about philosophy, literary criticism, and the politics of the time.

A collection of letters written by Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir offers a candid, provocative study of Sartre's literary, philosophical, and political evolution and of the social and cultural institutions of prewar Europe.

Sartre's famous autobiography of his first ten years. Written when he was 59 years old, this is a masterpiece of self-analysis. This book explores and evaluates the whole use of books and language in human experience.