Melville House Books

Jean-Paul Sartre never wrote a “total biography” of himself—nothing to compare, say, to the massive biography he wrote of Gustave Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famile (The Family Idiot)—but a show now on display at the Bibliotèque de France in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth amounts to something akin, says David Tresilian in a report for Al-Ahram Weekly. “Starting with items illustrating Sartre’s childhood and family background and concluding with a video presentation of the crowds that followed his funeral cortège through Paris in 1980,” writes Tresilian, “the exhibition presents the events of Sartre’s long life in the light of what turns out to be a voluminous quantity of commentary, provided by Sartre himself, by de Beauvoir in her volumes of autobiography, and by various associates and contemporaries of Sartre, such as journalist and novelist Albert Camus and philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with both of whom he had famously acrimonious fallings-out.” One thing that doesn’t really represent his life, however, has become subject of conversation in France: in a poster for the exhibition featuring a photo of the writer, his ever-present cigarette has been airbrushed out of his hand. It’s “especially ironic,” says Tresilian, “in the light of the philosopher’s much-advertised commitment to self-constituting and responsible choice.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.