The name Jean-Paul Sartre is recognized by millions around the world. By the time of his death in 1980 he was a public figure throughout Europe and something of a French and even worldwide intellectual property. His volumes have been translated into dozens of languages; he gave interviews to journalists from numerous countries; during his later years he supported the political causes of many groups and nations. While Albert Camus was perhaps more widely admired, especially during his lifetime, no mid-twentieth-century French writer was more notorious. If it is true of anyone, it can be said of him that he dominated his age.

He was par excellence the spokesman forla littérature engagée (committed literature); for him, writing was action. In literary history his work falls roughly between, on the one hand, surrealism and the great modernists such as André Gide and Marcel Proust...