Jean-Paul Sartre / Andrew Leak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leak, Andrew N., 1956-

Series:

Critical lives

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980.

Sartre, Jean-Paul.

Philosophers--France--Biography.

Philosophers.

France.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

165 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

London : Reaktion, 2006.

Summary:

'What I have just written is false. True, Neither true nor false, like everything one writes about madmen, about men.' With these sentences, Jean-Paul Sartre undermines the strict veracity of his own autobiography, Les Mots. Undeterred by such circumlocutions, Andrew Leak cuts through Sartre's own disavowals to unearth the man behind the twentieth century's most controversial intellectual.

Jean-Paul Sartre views the works of this literary and philosophical giant as events in his personal and public life, and reveals the close contexts in which his philosophy developed. Leak shows how Sartre was transformed by certain contemporary events, particularly his experiences during World War II, and probes his relationships with a range of people - from Simone de Beauvoir to Gaston Gallimard. He offers a way of understanding the enigmas and seeming contradictions in Sartre's very public, and occasionally hazardous, commitments. Beneath the images of a famous life - from pre-war apoliticism to alignment with the 1970s leftists, through erratic support for the French Communists and unswerving allegiance to all anti-colonial struggles - there runs a single unbroken thread: a quasi-neurotic attachment to the act of writing itself. This book follows that thread, as it explores the critical moments in Sartre's life and work.

Contents:

1 A Child in the Hall of Mirrors 9

2 Of Arms and a Man 41

3 The Price of Fame 65

4 The Shock of the Real 90

5 No More the Universal Intellectual 113

6 The Death and Life of Sartre 144.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1861892705

OCLC:

62761719