Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and<br> activist, Jean-Paul Sartre was also—and perhaps above all—a<br> great essayist. The essay was uniquely suited to Sartre because<br> of its intrinsically provisional and open-ended character. It is<br> the perfect form in which to dramatize the existential character<br> of our deepest intellectual, artistic, and political commitments.<br> This new selection of Sartre's essays, the first in English to<br> draw on the entire ten volumes of his collected essays as well<br> as previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily<br> searching appreciations of such writers and artists as Faulkner,<br> Bataille, and Giacometti; Sartre's great address to the French<br> people at the end of the occupation, “The Republic of Silence”;<br> sketches of the United States from his visit in the 1940s;<br> reflections on politics that are both incisive and incendiary;<br> portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning<br> with his own career from one of the interviews that ill-health<br> made his prime mode of communication late in life. Together<br> they add up to an unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and<br> sometimes reckless thinker and writer and his contentious, difficult<br> but never less than interesting times.