In March of 1980, Le Nouvel Observateur published the final interviews between the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, then blind and debilitated, and his young assistant, Benny Levy. Readers immediately denounced the interviews as distorted and fraudulent for portraying a Sartre who had abandoned his leftist convictions, rejected his most intimate friends, and cast aside his fundamental beliefs in favor of a messianic Judaism. Sartre's supporters argued that it was his orthodox interlocutor, Levy, who had twisted the words of the ailing philosopher.

Yet, shortly before his death, Sartre...

Truth and Existence, written in response to Martin Heidegger's Essence of Truth, is a product of the years when Sartre was reaching full stature as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist. This concise and engaging text not only presents Sartre's ontology of truth but also addresses the key moral questions of freedom, action, and bad faith.

Truth and Existence is introduced by an extended biographical, historical, and analytical essay by Ronald Aronson.

"Truth and Existence is another important element in the recently published...

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic Wretched of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century. The principle founder of existentialism, a political thinker and famous novelist and dramatist, his work has exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and cultural studies.
Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings is the first collection of Sartre's key philosophical writings and provides an indispensable resource for all students and readers of his work. Stephen Priest's clear and helpful introductions set each reading in context, making the volume an ideal companion to those coming to...

'We may therefore conclude that imagination is not an empirical power added to consciousness, but it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.' - Jean-Paul Sartre . Sartre's L'Imaginaire was first published in French in 1940 and in English in 1948. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, is of the recent French edition revised by Arlette Elkaim-Sartre. It corrects many important mistakes in the earlier English translation and includes a new introduction by Jonathan Webber, placing the book in a contemporary context. The Imaginary is one of Sartre's most important...

The Imaginary was originally published in France in 1940 as L'Imaginaire. Designed specifically as an essay in phenomenology, it marks the first attempt to introduce Husserl's work into French culture and from there to the English-speaking world. Published three years before Being and Nothingness, it contains Sartre's first extended examination of such concepts as nothingness and freedom. It is in The Imaginary that Sartre first presents the theories of human imagination and consciousness that were to drive his existentialism and his entire theories of human freedom. This new translation by...

The Age of Reason is set in 1938 and tells of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy who is obsessed with the idea of freedom. As the shadows of the Second World War draw closer - even as his personal life is complicated by his mistress's pregnancy - his search for a way to remain free becomes more and more intense.

A masterly historical re-creation, it depicts at once the negotiations between the British government under Neville Chamberlain and NaziGermany and the lives of the French people as the world braces itself for war.

The third novel of Sartre's monumental Roads to Freedom series, Troubled Sleep powerfully depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished feelings of a group of Frenchmen, whose prewar apathy gives way to a consciousness of the dignity of individual resistance--to the German occupation and to fate in general--and solidarity with other people similarly oppressed.

Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel was written while he was in prison. As Sartre recounts in his introduction, Genet penned this work on the brown paper which inmates were supposed to use to fold bags as a form of occupational therapy. The masterpiece he managed to produce under those difficult conditions is a lyrical portrait of the criminal underground of Paris and the thieves, murderers and pimps who occupied it. Genet approached this world through his protagonist, Divine, a male transvestite prostitute. In the world of Our Lady of the Flowers, moral conventions are turned on...