Sartre and Clio: Encounters with History

In Nausea, the 1938 novel that made Sartre famous, the protagonist is a historian who abandons the biography he is writing because he comes to believe that all histories are fictional, escapist, and useless. He sought the one and only truth of history; a truth that would revolutionize the world. By the time Sartre published his most mature works, he claimed to have written a biography that was perfectly true. This book examines how and why Sartre s position on the possibility and worth of historical knowledge changed so dramatically. In addition, it illuminates Sartre s unique contribution to the grand debate between Marxist and anarchist revolutionaries a debate that continues today.