During the phoney war that preceded the invasion of France, between late 1939 and the summer of 1940, the young Jean-Paul Sartre was stationed in his native Alsace as part of a meteorological unit. He used his considerable periods of spare time, between mundane duties like watching weather balloons, to make a series of notes on philosophy, literature, politics and autobiography that anticipate the themes of his later masterpieces, and often surpass them in literary verve and directness. These War Diaries form a portrait of Sartre in his most intense and brilliant phase. With them the twentieth century's most remarkable and public philosopher has provided us with a fitting posthumous monument to his honesty and creativity.

Author Biography

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and died there in 1980. After completing his education at the Ecole Normale, he taught philosophy in provincial lycees and in 1938 published his first novel Nausea. During the War, he participated in the Resistance and completed the major work which eventually won him international fame as an existentialist philosopher - Being and Nothingness (1943). After the Liberation, he founded the socialist journal Les Temps Modernes. He also wrote the novel-cycle The Roads to Freedom (1945-48). And was a prolific playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, which he refused. After the May Revolt of 1968, he assumed increasingly direct political work in France. In 1971-72, the first three volumes of his ambitious study of Flaubert's life and work appeared.