Jean-Paul Sartre: Protestant or Protester?, Vol. 1

Countless biographers have tried to unveil the real Jean Paul Sartre without his consent or cooperation. Only John Gerassi was honored with the responsibility of being Sartre's official biographer. His book sheds brilliant light on both the life and the thoughts of the man who embodied one of the prime intellectual movements of the twentieth century. 20 halftones.

Countless biographers have tried to unveil the real Jean-Paul Sartre without his consent or cooperation. Only John Gerassi—the "non-godson" of Sartre, an atheist—was honored with the responsibility of being Sartre's official biographer. After drafting the commission with Sartre on the back of a menu at La Coupole, Gerassi recorded over one hundred hours of interviews with him between 1974 and 1979, and another hundred hours with Sartre's friends, colleagues, and enemies. Gerassi also immersed himself in Sartre's literary, philosophical, and personal writings. Gerassi had access to all of Sartre's files, unpublished manuscripts, and extensive notes for planned but undelivered lectures. Simone de Beauvoir gave many of Sartre's unpublished letters to Gerassi as well. Sartre trusted the integrity of Gerassi so completely that he considered Gerassi's biography to be the continuation of his own autobiography, Les mots. As a personal friend, Gerassi writes with advantages shared by no other biographer of Sartre.

Publishers Weekly

To Gerassi, political science professor at City University of New York and longtime friend of Sartre, the French philosopher remains the 20th century's ``most unrelenting conscience,'' its greatest intellectual; he charges that many critics and biographers have tried to twist Sartre back into the mainstream. Most remarkable about this brilliantly original biography, the first half of a two-volume opus, is that it is authorized: Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir cooperated with the author from the early 1970s onward. Sartre's life is shown to have been an existential drama--he lived his childhood as a ``fraud,'' fathered by a ``small, sickly Catholic technocrat'' who raised him as a girl; small and physically ugly, the mature Sartre constantly seduced attractive women. He and de Beauvoir presented themselves as the ideal liberated couple, but Gerassi finds jealousy and possessiveness on both sides. Writing with energetic immediacy, the author argues that Sartre ``had never pretended to be a resistant during the war,'' and limns a gutsy intellectual caught between Gaullists and French Communists. Photos. (June)

John Gerassi is professor of political science at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. From 1956 to 1966, he was a journalist for Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Inter-Press Service. His many books include The Great Fear in Latin America, The Boys of Boise, Fidel Castro, The Coming of the New International and The Premature Antifacist.