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Original title Les Mots Country France Publication date 1963 Originally published 1963 Publisher George Braziller | 3.8/5 Goodreads Translator Bernard Frechtman Published in English September 1964 Page count 255 Published in english September 1964 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Jean-Paul Sartre books, Autobiographies, Philosopher books |
The Words (French: Les Mots) is Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963 autobiography.
Contents
Structure and presentation
The text is divided into two near-equal parts entitled 'Reading' and 'Writing'. However, according to Philippe Lejeune, these two parts are only a façade and are not relevant to the chronological progression of the work. He considers the text to instead be divided into five parts which he calls 'acts':
The first title which Sartre thought of was Jean sans terre.
Reception
The book, consisting of Sartre distancing himself from writing and making his farewells to literature was very successful for the author and was hailed nearly unanimously as a "literary success". In November of the same year, 1964, he refused the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded for his work, described as "rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age."