Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir 1940-63

Quiet Moments in a War, the companion volume to the acclaimed ‘Witness to My Life’, reveals Jean-Paul Sartre at the peak of his powers and renown, engaged in an exchange of ideas and intimacies with his “beloved Beaver,” Simone de Beauvoir. Spanning the years 1940-1963, these letters describe Sartre’s war – as a soldier, a prisoner of the Germans, and a man of the Resistance – and chart his path to fame with the publication of his major works. From September 1939 to June 1940, Sartre wrote Beauvoir almost daily from the front as he waited for the Germans to attack. It was a time of great productivity for Sartre, as he wrote the novel The Age of Reason and sketched out Being and Nothingness. In late 1940, he wrote his first play while interned in a German prison camp. The letters after his release reveal the wartime uncertainties and delays in securing a production of The Flies, an existential retelling of the Oresteia with a thinly veiled protest against acquiescence toward the German occupation. After 1942 there are fewer letters, as the couple was less often apart, but extraordinary ones. In almost every one, there is mention of a new play, novel, or essay underway. In 1946, Sartre writes Beauvoir from New York, where No Exit has opened and he is the toast of the town: “Here it is the same as in Paris: everyone is talking about me and everywhere I’m dragged through the mud”; and in 1959, from the Irish estate of John Huston, where the two men were working on a film about Freud. The collection ends in 1963, with a simple statement written by Beauvoir after Sartre’s death and shortly before her own: “This letter is the last that received from Sartre. Thereafter, during our brief separations, we used the telephone.” Quiet Moments in a War completes the extraordinary correspondence of one of modern history’s most celebrated couples, and documents the emergence of a great intellectual figure.