(He’d been that before, which is where my generation first heard of him before the dreary adaptation of The Roads to Freedom and the 70s reissues of his books in Penguin. By the time I was reading Literature in the late 80s and early 90s, and especially during my MA in 1994, he was a standing joke. Along the way he was so sexist that his various mistresses invented First Wave Feminism and took a lot of the credit for les evenements of May 1968, but didn’t actually risk his elder-statesman status by actually doing anything that might have got him arrested or thumped by les flics. People in black roll-necks (a look I have been known to rock) would blether about ‘Existentialism’ and ‘Anomie’ and his name would seldom be far from the conversation. Nausea was his pre-war smash, and then he did something or other in the Resistance (the extent of his actual involvement seems far less than, say, Camus or Beckett but he talked about it a lot more) then set about trying to ‘complete’ Marxist theory. He used to be the touchstone for self-pitiers everywhere, and the key writer for anyone who tried to dignify angst as a political statement. Unlike Salinger, Kafka, Dostoievsky, Conrad and all the other mardy lads beloved of sulky graduates with long black coats, Sartre’s fallen from his former ubiquity.
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