Sartre (1905-1980)

“It’s the whole world that I want to possess”, wrote Sartre in 1940.

Not for the faint-hearted to tell the story of this insatiable thinker, versatile writer, polemicist who challenged all authority and rejected almost every dogma. Not for the faint-hearted to describe his hegemony over the cultural trends of our century. A fortiori since, despite his death, his legend has already been firmly established.

This book is a cultural event. The intellectual who epitomised the twentieth century lives on in a biography that is as accurate as it is accessible. A multitude of documents, letters, unreleased testimonies shed a new light upon all aspects of this ‘little man’ who was the only writer ever to refuse the Nobel prize for literature, and who was described by General de Gaulle as “the Voltaire of the twentieth century”.