We Have Only This Life To Live

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as previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily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 never less than interesting times.

Author:  Jean-Paul Sartre

Publisher:  NYRB

Released Date: 2013

ISBN: 9781590174937