I picked up this little curiosity at a bookstore featured in Texas Monthly magazine. You know how people say you eat with your eyes first? The meal starts before you eat? I wonder if you sometimes start engaging with a book in a bookstore before opening the cover. In this case, I felt a little more adventurous while roaming the stacks. My TBR list was nowhere in sight. I was having fun making small talk, eavesdropping on the locals’ coffee circle, and just existing in the little bookstore. Hence, this little manifesto, which I’ll always associate with that experience. 
Sartre’s Literature & Existentialism is broken into three sections: (1) “What is writing?”, (2) “Why write?”, and (3) For Whom Does One Write?”. I was very engaged with parts one and two, which explored prose vs poetry, what is unique about writing as a medium, and the co-creation that happens between an engaged writer and reader. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“Language…is our shell and our antennae; it protects us against others and informs us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our neighbor’s heart.”
“Reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts on the other, demands of the other as much as he demands of himself.”
“However you might have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle. Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are engaged, willy-nilly.”
Part three takes up half the space in the book, and is a centuries-long overview existential lit-crit of French writers. That was not as gripping for me, personally. However, I did take away the idea that writers and readers exist in a context, and that to deny either one’s readership or the context can result in inauthentic work. Sartre illustrates a rather funny and I guess timeless caricature of a freeloading artist who enjoys the trapping of class and wealth but has to pretend to disdain such things.
Overall, I’m glad I picked up this book and gained some new insights into what is required from a writer and a reader. This book concludes an informal trilogy of books about reading that I have stumbled upon, along with Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading.
