Sartre

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 twentieth-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. 

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