Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940-1963

Sartre's (1905-1980) impassioned, tender wartime letters to de Beauvoir (1908-1986) intersect with history. The great majority of the correspondence gathered here was written in 1940, when the French philosopher, an army private in the meteorological service, wrote Being and Nothingness and his novel The Age of Reason while the Nazis invaded Holland and Belgium and threatened to take Paris. Writing to ``my darling Beaver,'' he tells de Beauvoir about his incessant reading, his evolving philosophy of existentialism and, in the spirit of their open relationship, about his affairs with other women. He was captured by the Germans in 1940. After his return to Nazi-occupied Paris in March 1941, his letters discuss The Flies , a thinly veiled protest play. Noteworthy among the handful of postwar letters are two recording his hectic 1959 visit to American film director John Huston at his Irish estate. (Nov.)