Sartre: A Life

The definitive life of the twentieth century's most public philosopher, traced from a fatherless Parisian childhood to the café tables where existentialism was born and on to the streets where Sartre marched, agitated, and refused the Nobel Prize. Annie Cohen-Solal had unprecedented access to those who knew him, and the result is less a dry chronicle than a portrait drawn from the inside out — the writer, the lover, the political firebrand, the small man with the wandering eye who somehow became the conscience of a generation. Witty, exhaustively researched, and quietly devastating, this is the biography that captures not just what Sartre thought but how he lived, contradictions and all.