Volume 34, Number 13 · August 13, 1987
Summing Up Sartre
By John Weightman
Sartre: A Life
by Annie Cohen-Solal, translated by Anna Cancogni, edited by Norman MacAfee
Pantheon Books, 591 pp., $24.95
Sartre: A Life
by Ronald Hayman
Simon and Schuster, 572 pp., $22.95
Sartre's Second Critique
by Ronald Aronson
University of Chicago Press, 253 pp., $13.95 (paper)
A Preface to Sartre
by Dominick LaCapra
Cornell University Press, 250 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre
by Denis Hollier, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, foreword by Jean-François Lyotard
University of Minnesota Press, 217 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century
edited by Hélène Vivienne Wenzel
Yale French Studies, Number 72, 219 pp., $12.95
Simone de Beauvoir: A Life…A Love Story
by Claude Francis, by Fernande Gontier, translated by Lisa Nesselson
St. Martin's, 412 pp., $18.95
Is Jean-Paul Sartre—philosopher, novelist, playwright, critic, biographer, political theorist and activist—to be revered as the outstanding intellectual and artistic figure of twentieth-century France, or was he, as George Orwell suggested in the early days of Sartre's fame, predominantly a windbag? To rephrase the question in politer terms, was he a great genius or just a colossally gifted word-spinner, strangely—almost frivolously—indifferent to the inconsistencies in his enormous output, and ultimately devoid of any concept of objective truth? Furthermore, was his association with Simone de Beauvoir an archetypal love affair, a pattern for modern heterosexual relationships, or was it largely a fiction that she created and that he never publicly brought into question, once they both had become famous?
Review, 7564 words
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