Nausea, The Wall & Other Stories by Jean-Paul Sartre [HARDCOVER OMNIBUS] 1999 • MJF Books

Nausea, The Wall & Other Stories by Jean-Paul Sartre [Translation by Lloyd Alexander]

FIRST EDITION OMNIBUS [1999] MJF BOOKS

Hardcover omnibus collecting Sartre's two best known works in one edition.

Hardcover with dust jacket in excellent condition.  Minor shelf wear.  Dust jacket now housed in a new archival quality jacket protector.

Jean-Paul Sartre, WINNER OF THE 1964 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Sartre's thought, work, and life profoundly influenced not only generations of French thinkers and writers, but a generation of Americans as well. In the decades following the Second World War the impact of Existentialism in the United States was enormous. Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others, brought to the United States a modern philosophical and psychological vocabulary with which to address the pressing spiritual crises of our time: the fundamental contingency of human life; the absence of any secure meaning in our actions; the apparent arbitrariness of human roles that ground action; and the uncertain basis of moral commitment.

These questions had been addressed in earlier decades as well, but the Existentialist writers, Sartre in particular, were distinguished by the attempt to communicate using literary forms other than the philosophical essay. This unique volume collects what are widely thought to be Sartre's finest literary writings other than his plays.
The publication of Nausea, his first full-scale work, preceded his immense treatise Being and Nothingness by six years, and it shows in embryonic form many of the issues that later found more explicit ly philosophical expression. It is the strange and gripping diary of a historian, struggling to understand his own life, the meaning of a life, and the meaning, perhaps, of meaning itself. The Wall and Other Stories includes five tales that further explore, through unusual psychological cases, the defining conditions of the human personality.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him.