Jean-Paul Sartre was arguably the most celebrated and written-about intellectual of the twentieth century. He was also one of the most divisive: twenty-five years after his death, his name still provokes revulsion and admiration in equal measure. But who really knew him? From early on, Sartre cultivated publicity and transparency as paradoxical shields of his privacy. Through an impressive range of biographical writings, interviews and films, and through the chronicling skills of his life-long companion Simone de Beauvoir, he effectively wrote his life as he was living it.

Author Biography

Andrew Leak is Head of the French Department, University College London, Editor of Sartre Studies International, and author of The Perverted Consciousness: Sexuality and Sartre (1989), and Roland Barthes: Mythologies (1994).