What Is Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in post-war thought and literature.

In What is Literature? Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of literature, exploring why we read, and why we write.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) was the foremost French thinker of the early post-war years. His books, which include Being and Nothingness, Psychology of the Imagination, Nausea, Iron in the Soul and The Age of Reason, have exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and cultural studies.