"Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and activist,
Jean-Paul Sartre was also and perhaps above all a great essayist. The essay
was uniquely suited to Sartre because of its intrinsically provisional and
open-ended character. It is the perfect form in which to dramatize the
existential character of our deepest intellectual, artistic, and political
commitments. This new selection of Sartre's essays, the first in English to
draw on the entire ten volumes of his collected essays as well as
previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily searching
appreciations of such writers and artists as Faulkner, Bataille, and
Giacometti; Sartre's great address to the French people at the end of the
occupation, The Republic of Silence ; sketches of the United States from
his visit in the 1940s; reflections on politics that are both incisive and
incendiary; portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning
with his own career from one of the interviews that ill-health made his
prime mode of communication late in life. Together they add up to an
unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and sometimes reckless thinker and
writer and his contentious, difficult but