1 1

We Have Only This Life to Live

We Have Only This Life to Live

The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

by Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Ronald Aronson, edited by Adrian van den Hoven

$24.95
$0.00 $24.95
Essays & Criticism French Literature International Literature Science & Philosophy
Format

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.

We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre.Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Ronald Aronson, edited by Adrian van den Hoven

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590174937
Pages: 592
Publication Date:

Praise

One of the most brilliant and versatile writers as well as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century.
—Times (London)

Nothing disproves the ill-informed criticisms that philosophy is an obscure field better than a philosopher's writings on allegedly non-philosophical topics. This collection of essays from the existentialist philosopher counters such claims and attests to philosophy's continued relevance without explicitly setting that goal. Now-commonplace subjects, like New York City and jazz, in Sartre's hands become telling indications of the differences between American and European metropolitan lifestyles, their solitary versus communal tendencies.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Sartre minced no words, and his easy, natural way of writing enabled him to expound on diverse subjects. [Here] existentialism is clear and logical. Sartre wrote essays probing every political and social theme of his time, providing a remarkable view of history. His literary criticism should be the established standard for book reviewing.
—Kirkus Reviews

Our teachers are those who bring us something radical and new, finding those ways of thinking that correspond to our modernity, our difficulties as well as our vague enthusiasms. That's what Sartre was for us twenty-year-olds. Who except Sartre knew how to say anything new?
—Gilles Deleuze

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it