SARTRE, Jean-Paul. [Peter Matthiessen].
Portrait of the Anti-Semite.
New York: Partisan Review, 1946.
$2,800.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152496
+$500
First Edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's Portrait of the Anti-Semite; Signed by Him, From the Library of Peter Matthiessen
First edition in English of Sartre's searching analysis of the anti-Semite, issued as the first number of the Partisan Review series and an early appearance in English of the essay he would expand into Anti-Semite and Jew. Slim octavo, original printed wrappers. Boldly signed by Jean-Paul Sartre on the front free endpaper. From the library of Peter Matthiessen, with his bookplate. Peter Matthiessen remains the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008). A prominent environmental activist, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008 at the age of 81 for Shadow Country. "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea" (Michael Dirda). In very good condition. Uncommon signed and with exceptional provenance.
Portrait of the Anti-Semite is the first part of Jean-Paul Sartre's Reflexions sur la question juive, written in 1944 in the aftermath of the German occupation of France and published here in an early English translation as the inaugural volume of the Partisan Review series in 1946. In it Sartre argues that the anti-Semite is not responding to anything real in the Jew but is fleeing from his own freedom and fear, choosing hatred as a way of becoming solid and unassailable, a portrait of bad faith that became one of the most influential postwar analyses of prejudice. The complete work appeared in English in 1948 as Anti-Semite and Jew. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 to 1980) was the leading figure of French existentialism and one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century, the author of Nausea, Being and Nothingness, and No Exit, and a founder of the review Les Temps Modernes. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he declined.
Portrait of the Anti-Semite.
$2,800.00
In Stock