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:
“I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, dont have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)
“There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be purepure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”
—Virginia Woolf (18821941)