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Busy Reader. The essays in What Is Literature? include a long one on the situation of the writer in various epochs. Written with Sartre's characteristic energy and the faint overtones of sounder sense that he has acquired since World War II and the French resistance, it places his own writing in the same class with the work of André Malraux and Antoine de St. Exupéry—Frenchmen of action, compelled to do their work in a time of disintegrating values when any act had to be its own justification. Thus he seems to write an apologia for such books as Nausea as having been conditioned by a certain time and place:
"Our elders wrote for idle souls, but for the public which we, in our turn, were going to address, the vacation was over. It was composed of men of our sort who, like us, were expecting war and death. For these readers without leisure, occupied without respite with a single concern, there was only one fitting subject . . . their war and their death . . ."