Literature
Sartre wrote self-consciously and successfully in a number of literary modes and made major contributions to literary criticism and literary biography. His plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres," usually translated as "Hell is other people." Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major work of fiction was The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism.
Despite their similarities as polemicists, novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's literary work has been counterposed, often pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular imagination.
In 1948 the Roman Catholic Church placed Sartre's oeuvre on the Index of prohibited books.
Read more about this topic: Jean-Paul Sartre
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the wrong crowd read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who werent planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“There are people whom even childrens literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (18601904)
“I make a virtue of my suffering
From nearly everything that goes on round me.
In other words, I know wherever I am,
Being the creature of literature I am,
I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.”
—Robert Frost (18741963)