THE WORDS

Jean-Paul Sartre was arguably the best-known and most influential French writer of his time. As a philosopher, as a novelist, as a playwright, as the author of filmscripts, as the editor of Les Temps Modernes, as a man who was never afraid to commit himself to the moral and political as well as the literary life of his own times, he was unique. Not since Voltaire has Western civilization produced so humane, manifold, and boldly "engaged" a man of letters. At 59, he undertook his autobiography, bringing to his own childhood the same rigor of honesty and insight which he had applied so brilliantly in earlier books to Baudelaire and Jean Genet. "Directed to the heart as well as to the intellect," the result is like nothing else in the Sartre canon, or in France, where The Words has been accorded a place beside that other masterpiece of self-analysis, Rousseau's Confessions.--Adapted from publisher description.