Literature
Sartre wrote self-consciously and successfully in a number of literary modes and made major contributions to literary criticism and literary biography. His plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres," usually translated as "Hell is other people." Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major work of fiction was The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism.
Despite their similarities as polemicists, novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's literary work has been counterposed, often pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular imagination.
In 1948 the Roman Catholic Church placed Sartre's oeuvre on the Index of prohibited books.
Read more about this topic: Jean-Paul Sartre
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Literature must become Party literature.... Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (18701924)
“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
—Italo Calvino (19231985)