Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political think
ers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible t
o the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inher
itance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement
which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hu
gely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoke
d a revolution in post-war thought and literature.
In What is Literature? Sar
tre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of
literature, exploring why we read, and why we write.
