Introduction

One of the most noteworthy instances of literary friendship in the 20th century is found among the philosophical and literary trio of Albert Camus (1913–1960), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) — easily recognizable by his habit of chain-smoking, horn-rimmed glasses and exotropia of his blind right eye — and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). All three were prolific writers, authoring among themselves philosophical treatises, essays, plays, novels, and memoirs, and all three shared an interest in existential themes such as the experience of freedom, anguish, anxiety, absurdity, and the pursuit of meaning. The times they were living in, which included the Nazi occupation of France from 1940–44, made for a stark backdrop to the course of their lives, philosophies and works. All three took a particular interest in the political events of their time, writing for left-wing publications and attending demonstrations.

Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957; Jean-Paul Sartre was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1964, which he declined. Simone de Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious award in French literature, for her novel The Mandarins, published in 1954. With their staunch, humane, and individualist outlooks reminiscent of the earlier existentialist writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, all three of the authors continue to exercise a significant influence on philosophy and literature through the present day.

Philosophical Milieus: Existentialism and Absurdism

Existentialism is a philosophical and literary movement having its roots in the philosophical writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881). Whereas Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were Christian authors, Nietzsche was an atheist, and existentialists are sometimes grouped into Christian existentialism and atheistic existentialism, with the latter group including Sartre and Beauvoir. Common to both groups of existentialists are the experience of feelings of absurdity, anguish, doubt, and perplexity that are sometimes occasioned within the monotony of daily life. The concern with authenticity is also common to both groups of existentialists, who ultimately deal with similar experiences and concerns of individual consistency of character. Existentialism more formally posits, per Jean-Paul Sartre's formula, "existence precedes essence" — the idea that meaning in life is not innate, but must be found or created. Sartre's formula also expresses the importance of freedom and self-determination: biological characteristics, family, upbringing, and passive experiences may be found to preexist, but it is up to us to decide what meaning our lives may have.

While Sartre and Beauvoir were considered existentialists, and are often — arguably erroneously — grouped with Camus under this umbrella, Camus made a point of distancing himself from the existentialist label, preferring to call himself an absurdist. In contradistinction to existentialism, which emphasizes the creation or discovery of meaning, Camus posited, in keeping with his self-identification as an absurdist writer, and going further than Sartre, in holding that not only is meaning in life not innate, but there is no transcendent meaning that we can find or arrive at. Meaning is experienced, and either found or created, subjectively, in a world in which there is no objective meaning. But Camus went further than simply positing this stark outlook in the abstract: his novels deal intimately with the lives of people living in a world without meaning, humanely chronicling their attempts to interpret the events of their lives and their the fate that they suffer, often taken in a special and subjective relationship to the problem of meaning.

For Camus, the absence of metaphysical vindication for the daily suffering and difficulties of life occasions, from time to time, the feeling of the absurd. In his most read philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus confronts this concern of absurdity directly, writing somewhat mystifyingly that: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" (Camus 2004, 495). He goes on to consider different approaches to dealing with the feeling and experience of absurdity, which may include abstract, philosophical suicide, orientations toward life such as Don Juanism, and what Camus refers to as absurd creation.

The myth of Sisyphus itself is, of course, a myth from ancient Greece:

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour. […] If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. (Camus, 2004, 589)

Camus's choice of the fate of Sisyphus as an archetypal image speaks to the ordinary lives of mortals, laboring to attain happiness or satisfaction in an otherwise futile, absurd endeavor on the path from life to death.

Early Engagement: Book Reviews

Camus had read Sartre in 1938–39, reviewing Nausea and The Wall in a column called "The Reading Room" for a left-wing publication in Algiers. He began his review of Nausea by stating that "a novel is nothing but a philosophy expressed in images" (Aronson, 2004, 11), admiring the philosophical nature of Sartre's novel. But although his review of Nausea was very positive, he was not uncritical of its presentation, writing that the "the descriptive and philosophical aspects of the novel 'don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes art of the novel'" (ibid.). Camus compares Sartre's book to the writings of Kafka, but in distinction to Kafka,

"some indefinable obstacle prevents the reader from participating and holds him back when he is on the very threshold of consent." […] Sartre dwells on the repugnant features of humankind "instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness." (Aronson, 2004, 12)

Camus's conclusion "stresses his admiration":

This is the first novel from a writer from whom everything may be expected. So natural a suppleness in staying on the far boundaries of conscious thought, so painful a lucidity, are indications of limitless gifts. These are grounds for welcoming Nausea as the first summons of an original and vigorous mind whose lessons and works to come we are impatient to see. (Aronson, 2004, 12)

Camus would go on, in February 1939, to review Sartre's book of short stories, The Wall, praising Sartre's lucidity more unambiguously, and despite the negativity of its characters and the absurdity of their experiences: "From this stems both the immense interest and absolute mastery of Sartre's stories […]. [His] art lies in the detail with which he depicts his absurd creatures, the way he observes their monotonous behavior" (Aronson, 2004, 12). Camus's review of The Wall concluded positively:

A great writer always introduces his own world and its message. Sartre's brings us to nothingness, but also to lucidity. And the image he perpetuates through his characters, of a man seated amid the ruins of his life, is a good illustration of the greatness and truth of his work. (Aronson, 2004, 13)

Sartre himself discovered Camus weeks after completing Being and Nothingness, his magnum opus of existentialist phenomenology, writing a 6,000-word essay reviewing Camus's novel The Stranger alongside The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus's philosophical statement on absurdism:

The absurd […] resides neither in man nor in the world if you consider each separately. But since man's dominant characteristic is "being-in-the-world," the absurd is, in the end, an inseparable part of the human condition. Thus, the absurd is not, to begin with, the object of a mere idea; it is revealed to us in a doleful illumination. […] If we are able to refuse the misleading aid of religion or existential philosophies, we then possess certain basic, obvious facts: the world is chaos, a 'divine equivalence born of anarchy' tomorrow does not exist, since we all die. "In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger." (Aronson, 2004, 13)

Thus the pair of Camus and Sartre was set in motion by the kinetic energy of their mutual interest in one another's already published writings. Not only their shared literary interest in the feeling of absurdity, ambiguity, anxiety, and related experiences, would draw them together as kindred spirits, but also their personalities.

Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, was notably a prolific writer of memoirs, and her personal accounts provide significant insight into the friendship and activities of the three authors.

First Encounters

Sartre and Beauvoir met in 1929 at the Sorbonne, he being 24 and Beauvoir 21, while both were studying for the agrégation, a rigorous qualifying exam, passing which allows one to teach in secondary schools or universities in France. Simone de Beauvoir taught variously at lycées from 1929–1943: the Lycée Montgrand in Marseille, the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc in Rouen, and the Lycée Molière (Paris). Sartre taught at the lycées of Le Havre from 1931–1936, Laon from 1936–37, in Paris at the Lycée Pasteur from 1937–1939, and at the Lycée Condorcet from 1941–1944. At the Sorbonne, Sartre and Beauvoir would become lovers and allies, reading each other's writings and conversing freely about philosophy and life.

Camus and Sartre first met in the summer of 1943, at the opening performance of Sartre's play The Flies (Aronson, 2004, 9). Both writers were already published by Gallimard (a prominent and still extant French-language publisher), and the two had by then established a mutual interest in one other's writings. The trio of Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir first met in earnest at the Café Flore, where Sartre and Beauvoir "worked, kept warm, ate, and socialized" (Aronson, 2004, 10). Beauvoir expressed that "what led to the ice being broken" between the three of them was "Camus's passion for the theater":

"Sartre talked of his new play [No Exit] and the conditions that would govern its production. Then he suggested that Camus should play the lead and stage it. Camus hesitated at first, but when Sartre pressed the point he agreed. […] His youth and independence created bonds between us: we were all solitaries, who had developed without the aid of any 'school' we belonged to no group or clique." (Aronson, 2004, 10)

Camus was married at the time, but because of the circumstances of the war, his wife stayed behind in North Africa. Camus's and Sartre's plans to collaborate on the staging of No Exit were complicated by the arrest of the wife of the play's financial backer, due to her being suspected on Resistance activity; she had been set to star as one of the characters in the play. Camus declined to act in a professional production on the Paris stage, but "the friendship [between Sartre and Camus] was cemented" (Aronson, 2004, 10).

Camus was, Sartre said, "my absolute opposite: handsome, elegant, a rationalist" (Aronson, 2004, 17). According to Beauvoir, Camus

was a simple, cheerful soul. In a good mood he was not above somewhat facile jokes; there was a waiter at the Flore called Pascal, whom he insisted on referring to as Descartes. But he could afford to allow himself such indulgences; his great charm, the product of nonchalance and enthusiasm in just the right proportions, insured him against any risk of vulgarity. What I liked most about him was his capacity for detached amusement at people and things even while he was intensely occupied with his personal activities, pleasures, and friendships. (Aronson, 2004, 18–19)

Beauvoir recounts that at one point she "offered herself to Camus as a lover, but he rebuffed her" (Aronson, 2004, 19). Beauvoir may have served partly to inspire the main character in his later short story "The Adulterous Woman," contained in the collection of stories Exile and the Kingdom.

Sartre and Beauvoir themselves had a lifelong open relationship, and both of them had affairs with other romantic partners. This did not, however, prevent them from remaining close companions late into life, routinely reviewing one another's writing and spending significant time together.

Paris

The trio would remain close-knit for some years, frequenting soirées that Simone de Beauvoir would arrange. They befriended other figures of the Paris tableau, such as Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, and numerous others, which Beauvoir recounts in her memoir The Prime of Life. Beauvoir writes:

[W]e constituted a sort of carnival, with its mountebanks, its confidence-men, its clowns, and its parades. Dora Maar used to mime a bullfighting act; Sartre conducted an orchestra from the bottom of a cupboard; Limbour carved up a ham as though he were a cannibal; Queneau and Bataille fought a duel with bottles instead of swords; Camus and Lemarchand played military marches on saucepan lids, while those who knew how to sing, sang. So did those who didn't. We had pantomimes, comedies, diatribes, parodies, monologues, and confessions: the flow of improvisations never dried up, and they were always greeted with enthusiastic applause. We put on records and danced; some of us, such as Olga, Wanda, and Camus, very well; others less expertly. (Aronson, 2004, 18)

These gatherings and the frequenting of Parisian cafes would characterize their social lives during the 1940s and early 1950s. They enjoyed a high profile together as literary celebrities, until the falling out between Sartre and Camus which occurred around the time of Camus's publishing The Rebel in 1951.

Activism

Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir all occupied themselves variously with political activism, particularly during WWII, with the three authors writing for left-wing publications and participating in organizations aimed at opposing political repression.

Beauvoir recounts that:

While books and entertainments meant a good deal to us, public events touched us scarcely at all. Changes of cabinet and League of Nations debates we found about as futile as the scuffles provoked from time to time by the Camelots du Roy. Vast financial scandals did not shock us, since for us capitalism and corruption were synonymous terms. (Beauvoir 1960, 50)

Sartre was briefly captured as a prisoner of war in 1940 while serving as a meteorologist for the French Army. During his captivity he read Heidegger's Being and Time and authored Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a play. He was released in April 1941 for poor health, including eye problems. Upon his release, he formed a Resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a number of his current and former students (Aronson, 2004, 29). The group printed and distributed anti-German pamphlets. The group experienced lukewarm success and was soon dissolved. Nevertheless, Sartre wrote voluminously during these years, completing Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit. In 1943, Sartre was invited into the Resistance writers' group the Comité National des Écrivains (CNE), and contributed to the CNE's Les Lettres Françaises.

Camus wrote a number of "Letters to a German Friend" in July 1943, shortly after first meeting Sartre at the opening performance of The Flies. Camus approached the German occupation of France from the perspective of his absurdist philosophy, contrasting the French motives in fighting with those of the invading Germans, stressing the nonviolent nature of the French:

"We waited until we saw clearly, and, in poverty and suffering, we had the joy of fighting at the same time for all we loved. You, on the other hand, are fighting against everything in man that does not belong to the mother country." (Aronson, 2004, 32)

Sartre, Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty founded a leftist literary journal called Les Temps Moderne, which Sartre directed and which published its first issue in 1945. During the Algerian War (1954–1962), the publication supported the cause of Algerian independence from France, opposing the use of torture by French forces, and printed testimonies of French soldiers.

Camus was active as member of the Algerian branch of the French Communist Party from 1935–37 (Aronson, 25).

Camus wrote for the clandestine French Resistance newspaper Combat, founded in 1941, to which Sartre contributed material; in 1944 Camus became its editor in chief. In 1957, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he published his essay "Reflections on the Guillotine," advocating for abolition of the death penalty. Beauvoir revealed to her biographer after Sartre's death that it was in fact she who had authored the articles written for Combat by Sartre, where his name had appeared at the top of the front page after the war ended (Aronson, 2004, 24).

On May 20, 1968, Sartre spoke on a student movement to a crowd of some 7,000 students at the Sorbonne in Paris, establishing his position as a revolutionary intellectual. Beauvoir was present, and wrote about the gathering (Bakewell, 2016, 22–23).

Falling Out

Despite being tight-knit for some years, including throughout the 1940s, the friendship between Camus and Sartre would dissolve in bitterness and wounded pride. In 1952, following Camus's publication of The Rebel, in which he attacks communists and their willingness to use violence to achieve their political goals; Sartre wrote a letter (addressed "My Dear Camus") to Camus that formally ended their friendship, which included a tribute to the younger Camus who Sartre had known and appreciated previously:

[Y]ou gave yourself unreservedly to the Resistance. You lived through a fight which was austere, without glory or fanfare. Its dangers were hardly exalting; and worse, you took the risk of being degraded and vilified. […] [You lived this history] more deeply and fully than many of us (myself included). […] [You became] the admirable conjunction of a person, an action, and a work. (Aronson, 2004, 37)

In 1946, Camus, who had been writing a series of articles for Combat under the heading Neither Victims nor Executioners, had differed with Maurice Merleau-Ponty on a central issue of an article he wrote. According to Beauvoir, at a party given by Boris and Michelle Vian:

[Camus] attacked Merleau-Ponty on the subject of his article, "The Yogi and the Proletarian," accused him of justifying the Moscow trials and was appalled that opposition could be made into treason. Merleau-Ponty defended himself, Sartre supported him; Camus, shattered, left, slamming the door behind him; Sartre and Boris rushed out and ran after him along the street, but he refused to come back. This quarrel was to last until March 1947. (Aronson, 2004, 66)

Camus was critical of Soviet communism and its justifications for violence. Sartre, although ambivalent about the Soviet Union, was sympathetic to Marxism, including the issue of using violence to achieve political goals, holding that sometimes violence is necessary to combat oppression.

Ronald Aronson, the author of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, maintains that Camus's book The Myth of Sisyphus represents an indirect break from and opposition to Marxism, with its central issue of the myth of Sisyphus, an image of endless, absurd labor, representing an alternative to Marxism (Aronson, 2004, 73). Camus had been a member of the PCF (Parti Communiste Français, the French Communist Party) in the 1930s but came to distance himself from the ideology of communism.

As the dispute between Sartre and Camus developed, in 1952 it was widely publicized by the papers L'Observateur and Le Monde, which identified the falling out as deriving partly from Sartre's and Camus's attitudes toward communism, but partly also as a difference between the two personalities. Sartre's publication Les Temps Moderne and Camus's Combat both became involved in the dispute. Sartre was more comfortable with the negative publicity than Camus, publishing scathing criticisms of his former friend, while Camus struggled to find his bearings. The rift created would last for the rest of their lives and careers.

The end of the friendship between Camus and Sartre would cast a shadow over their productive lives; the years immediately following their break would prove some of the least productive literarily for either Sartre or Camus (Aronson, 2004, 177). Sartre's writing at that point expressed his sympathies for Marxism, a proclivity that would continue for the rest of his life, with the writing of Search for a Method and its late follow-up, the philosophical treatise Critique of Dialectical Reason, in which Sartre attempts to further synthesize existentialism and Marxism. Camus, who had undergone a change of heart since his early affiliation with the Communist Party, was sharply critical of the communist movement, notably its willingness to use violence to achieve its political goals, and in The Rebel, Camus took up a staunchly anti-communist stance.

Death of Albert Camus

Camus died on January 4, 1960, when the car in which he was riding in the passenger seat with his publisher Michel Gallimard, crashed into a tree, killing both. He was 46 years old.

Death of Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre died of pulmonary edema on April 15, 1980 at the age of 74. At Sartre's funeral on April 19, 1980, 50,000 people were recorded in attendance (Bakewell, 2016, 24).

Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book in homage to Sartre, entitled Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, containing an account of Sartre's later years and a lengthy segment of dialogue titled "Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre," recounting various conversations had between the two writers.

Death of Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia on April 14, 1986, at the age of 78, and was buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Major works by Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

The Myth of Sisyphus represents the principle philosophical work of absurdism, beginning with the remark that "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Elaborating on this claim, Camus proceeds, in keeping with his philosophical demonym of absurdism, topics like "philosophical suicide," the problem of living in an absurd world — covering subjects like Don Juanism — and "absurd creation." The myth of Sisyphus takes on the aspect of an archetypal image of man, whereby he is to seek meaning and validity in life through the laborious task of endlessly pushing a rock up a hill.

The Stranger (1946)

The Stranger, written in the first person, follows one Meursault, whose mother has recently died, to her funeral and the subsequent events of his daily affairs. An atheist and hedonist, he enters into a number of friendships and becomes romantically involved with a woman while swimming, demonstrating apparent indifference at the recent death of his mother. Toward the end of the first part of the novel, Meursault shoots an Arab at the beach and is arrested, and the second half of the book deals with his imprisonment and trial.

The Plague (1947)

The Plague chronicles the affairs of a Doctor Rieux and a number of residents of the coastal city of Oran in Algeria, following an outbreak of bubonic plague that causes thousands of rats around the city to crawl into the open to die in the streets. The novel focuses on the psychological development and interpersonal circumstances its protagonists, who are quarantined in the city as the plague spreads and engulfs the city, killing thousands.

Other writings by Camus

Fiction

• The Fall (1956).
• Exile and the Kingdom (1957). A collection of short stories.
• A Happy Death (1971, written 1936–38, published posthumously).
• The First Man (1994, unfinished, published posthumously).

Nonfiction

• The Rebel (1951).

Plays

• Caligula (1938, performed 1945).
• The Misunderstanding (1944).
• The State of Siege (1948).
• The Just Assassins (1949).
• Requiem for a Nun (1956).
• The Possessed (1959).

Major works by Sartre

Nausea (1938)

Sartre's first novel takes place in the form of diaries of one Antoine Roquentin, who grapples with feelings of meaninglessness and isolation.

The Wall (1939)

Sartre's second major work of fiction, a collection of stories, published 1939. The first story, which gives title to the book, follows a number of captives set for execution during the Spanish Civil War, which had ended just months before the collection's writing.

Being and Nothingness (1943)

Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical treatise and magnum opus on existentialism, undertakes a sweeping survey of lived experience and the psychological structure of thought and action. The substance of the book is strongly influenced by his earlier reading of Edmund Husserl's philosophical work in phenomenology, which had culminated in Sartre's writing of a paper entitled "Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology." Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, Being and Nothingness also represents a break from Sartre's influences and the development of his own phenomenologically-influenced theories on the lived human experience. Part One of the work undertakes a seemingly almost metaphysical, but actually predominantly phenomenological investigation of the status of nothingness; while Part Two investigates Being-for-Itself, developing a "positive" phenomenology and ontology.

Being and Nothingness: Bad Faith

Being and Nothingness introduces Sartre's influential psychological concept of mauvaise fois (bad faith), to which he devotes a full chapter, containing three separate sections. Bad faith occurs when consciousness, "instead of directing its negation outward[,] turns it toward itself" (Sartre, 1943, 87). In more everyday terms, bad faith involves the relation of the self to itself that is conditioned by being characterized by falsehood, such as a dishonest self-conception. Sartre contrasts bad faith with "good faith": "If I believe that my friend Pierre likes me, this means that his friendship appears to me as the meaning of all his acts. Belief is a particular consciousness of the meaning of Pierre's acts" (ibid., 114). He elaborates further on bad faith:

In bad faith there is no cynical lie nor knowing preparation for deceitful concepts. But the first act of bad faith is to flee what it can not flee, to flee what it is. […] Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself by means of the inner disintegration of my being. But it denies this very disintegration as it denies that it is itself bad faith. Bad faith seeks by means of 'not-being-what-one-is' to escape from the in-itself which I am not in the mode of being what one is not. […] If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith. (Sartre, 1943, 115–116)

Thus bad faith for Sartre represents, in short, dishonesty directed toward oneself. It is not necessarily founded on a conscious decision or intention, but rather entails a radical orientation toward one's own being or situation characterized by falsehood.

Being and Nothingness: The Other

Part Three of the work undertakes, notably, an investigation of interactions with others, which, reminiscent of Hegel's master and slave dialectic (although Sartre's account is arguably more forgiving than that found in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit), establishes human interaction as, in a certain sense, oppressive or confrontational. This is because the presence of the Other, that is, any other human being, exerts an unambiguous command of our attention: "At the origin of the problem of the existence of others, there is a fundamental presupposition: others are the Other, that is the self which is not myself" (Sartre, 1943, 312). An encounter with another person also necessarily involves us with their perceptions and preconceptions. This command on our attention permits us to respond to the Other's presence and not ignore it. We could theoretically choose to ignore someone, but the presence of the Other exacts its demands upon our awareness all the same. Sartre's examination of consciousness and human interaction, moreover, touches on emotions like shame and fear, and constitutes an independent psychological inquiry parallel to the efforts of predecessors in the study of psychology, such as Sigmund Freud.

Being and Nothingness: Freedom

Influenced by Husserl's phenomenology and Cartesian Meditations, Sartre's opus frequently references Descartes' cogito and undertakes examinations of the theories of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. Although a challenging, highly technical work, Sartre's observations in general bring us closer to ourselves, with, for example, Chapter 2 devoted to the body and its relations to consciousness (Sartre, 1943, 401). In Part Four, Chapter 1, "Being and Doing: Freedom" (559), Sartre gets underway with a discussion of one of the most central concepts of existentialism: freedom. Here Sartre confronts the philosophical problem of determinism and free will by objecting to the abstract structure of the question, raising the primary importance of action. For Sartre, action relates the thinking subject to the world by means of the possible: "Consciousness, in so far as it is considered exclusively in its being, is perpetually referred from being to being and can not find in being any motive for revealing non-being" (ibid., 560).

No Exit (1944)

No Exit, loosely translated from Huis Clos ("Closed Door"), is arguably Sartre's best known work, a play centering on the fate of three individuals, a man and two women, who have been condemned to hell, albeit a hell of a certain idiosyncratic character, innocuously akin to that of an aristocratic and wealthy lifestyle. Garcin, the first of the three main characters, is introduced by a valet to a richly decorated and upholstered drawing-room "in the Second Empire style" (Sartre, 1946, 3). After some back-and-forth with the valet, Garcin is introduced to Inez and Estelle, the other two main characters. The play focuses on the psychology of the three main characters as they gradually spiral into hatred and resentment for one another. The famous and often quoted Sartre phrase, "Hell is other people" is found near the end of the play, an oft-repeated and mystifying quote of Sartre and existentialism.

Critical writings by Sartre

Sartre produced numerous significant critical writings, including Baudelaire (1950), chronicling the life of Charles Baudelaire; Saint Genet (1952), a biography of the author-misfit Jean Genet; and The Family Idiot, a sprawling study of the life and writings of Gustav Flaubert, which Sartre left unfinished at the time of his death.

Other philosophical writings by Sartre

• The Transcendence of the Ego (1937), in which he breaks with the Husserlian conception of a transcendental ego.
• Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), analyzing and attacking the roots of anti-Semitism.
• Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), an essay explaining and defending existentialism.
• Search for a Method (1957), investigating the relationship between Marxism and existentialism.
• Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), a philosophical treatise of the scope of Being and Nothingness, in which Sartre further develops the ties between existentialism and Marxism begun in his Search for a Method.

Writings by Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex (1949)

Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical, psychological, sociological, and historical magnum opus, The Second Sex, represents a sweeping investigation of the nature of womanhood and femininity, and was written at a time when women were beginning to gain an equal footing with their male contemporaries. In this book, Beauvoir examines the biological, psychological, historical, and religious bases of interpretation of the essence of femininity and what it means to be a woman, from birth to death, in childhood, marriage, and society. Beauvoir considers the feminine condition to be one generally characterized by otherness and objectification. Woman is a negative, while man is the positive. While this state of affairs may seem bleak, Beauvoir's study is colored by her existentialist bent, is aimed at the progressive development of, and not only the description of, femininity and womanhood. Her study is informed by her background in philosophy, including interpretive digressions on theological writers that display a sensitivity to those authors' understanding, but also a willingness to break from traditional dogmas, especially including misogynistic narratives.

Like Virginia Woolf, whose works Beauvoir was intimately familiar with (Beauvoir 1960, 51), in her landmark essay on female creativity, A Room of One's Own, Beauvoir gives examples from historical studies of women by men that expressed profound chauvinism, conditioned by the notions common to their times, and describing women as having inferior intellects and demonstrating this through dubious means characterized by prejudice — and no doubt a desire to maintain woman's lower social status.

Conducting a thorough investigation of the feminine psychology and womanhood throughout history, Beauvoir locates herself in a context that remains ambiguously and questionably related toward women, while marking out broad indications toward the realm of the possible and the progressive. Going beyond the bounds of the existentialist label, The Second Sex would prove to be a seminal work of feminist literature and social philosophy years ahead of its time, laying the foundations for future feminist authors such as Judith Butler — who is best known for publishing Gender Trouble in 1990, and remains a major figure in critical theory and post-structural philosophy through the present day.

Other writings by Simone de Beauvoir

Memoirs

• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958).
• The Prime of Life (1960).
• Force of Circumstance (1963).
• Old Age (1972).
• Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981).

Fiction

• She Came to Stay (1943).
• The Blood of Others (1945).
• All Men Are Mortal (1946).
• The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).
• The Mandarins (1954), for which she won the Prix Goncourt.
• Misunderstanding in Moscow (1966).
• The Woman Destroyed (1967, a book of short stories).
• When Things of the Spirit Come First (1979).

Nonfiction

• Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944).
• America Day by Day (1954).
• Must We Burn Sade? (1955).
• The Long March (1957).
• Force of Circumstance (1963).
• A Very Easy Death (1964).
• The Coming of Age (1970).
• All Said and Done (1972).
• Letters to Sartre (1990).
• A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren (1998).

Bibliography

• Aronson, Ronald, 2004. Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
• Bakewell, Sarah, 2016. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. New York, Other Press.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1981. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Translated by Patrick O'Brian, 1984. New York, Pantheon Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman, 1948. New York, Philosophical Library.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1958. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translated by The World Publishing Company, 1959. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
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• Camus, Albert, 2004. The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Justin O'Brien, Hamish Hamilton. New York, Alfred A. Knopf (Everyman's Library).
• Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1943. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1992. New York, Washington Square Press.
• Sartre, Jean Paul, 1946. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Lionel Abel. New York, Vintage International.
• Sartre, Jean Paul, 1939. The Wall. Translated by Lloyd Alexander, 1948. New York, New Directions Books.