Jean-Paul Sartre - Literature

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:

    The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
    Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)

    How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)