Sartre and Nizan Essays are at the heart of Michael Scriven’s writing enterprise. They are focused on the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Nizan and include the following books: Sartre’s Existential Biographies (Macmillan and St Martins, 1984), Paul Nizan Communist Novelist (Macmillan and St Martins, 1988), Sartre and the Media, (Macmillan and St Martins,1993), and Jean Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France. (Macmillan and St Martins, 1999; La Chasse au snark, 2001). He has also contributed articles on Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Nizan to Les Temps Modernes and Europe.
Sartre and Nizan Essays – Sartre’s Existential Biographies
Michael Scriven
Between 1946 and 1981 approximately four thousand pages of Sartre’s biographical discourse were published; that’s almost two million words. Yet the average reader rarely, if ever, associates Sartre’s name with biography.
Sartre spent thirty years of his life engaged in one way or another in writing the biographies of several poets, novelists and dramatists, and one painter. Yet he vigorously proclaimed all the while that the primary task of a contemporary writer was to produce literature which mobilized the reading public towards participation in the significant socio-political issues of our time. 
Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 in recognition of the literary talents displayed in his autobiography, Les Mots, Sartre refused this prestigious accolade on the grounds that he did not wish to become the spokesman of a Western bourgeois cultural institution. Yet Les Mots, the most widely read of Sartre’s biographies, has been unanimously acclaimed by the bourgeois reading public precisely and paradoxically because it sanctifies in some way the very bourgeois cultural institutions that Sartre relentlessly attacks.
Towards the end of his life, Sartre declared that of all the books that he had written those which came closest to his literary ideal were his biographies of Genet and Flaubert. Yet very few people have read either of them. Their serpentine length, their methodological complexity and their sheer cost deter a mass readership. Despite Sartre’s evident concern to produce democratic literature for the majority, his biographies of Genet and Flaubert are destined to be studied by a specialized academic elite, not the man in the street.
Manifestly, Sartre’s Existential Biographies are a network of contradictions which epitomize the contradictory nature of literature in the society in which we live. This book is an attempt to explain some of these contradictions.
Sartre and Nizan Essays – Paul Nizan Communist Novelist
Michael Scriven
Paul Nizan died in 1940 at the age of 35. A dedicated member of the French communist party throughout his life, he nonetheless resigned from the party in September 1939, following the Nazi-Soviet pact of non-aggression and the Soviet invasion of Poland. Judged a traitor to the communist cause in its hour of need, he was subsequently denigrated by the PCF during the Cold war period, and was rescued from oblivion only in 1960 when his lifelong friend Jean-Paul Sartre prefaced a new edition of Nizan’s first angry anti-establishment text, Aden Arabie.
Although his life was short, Paul Nizan produced a wide range of communist inspired writings, notably three novels – Antoine Bloyé, Le Cheval de Troie and La Conspiration. The blend of communist militancy and existential angst which Nizan distils in each of these novels is the centre of analysis in this book.
An account of the experience of a highly original French communist party activist, and an assessment of a highly talented French communist party writer, Paul Nizan Communist Novelist, will appeal to all those interested in French political history and the literature of the French Left.
Sartre and Nizan Essays – Sartre and the Media
Michael Scriven
Sartre and the Media is the first book to offer a systematic account of Sartre’s involvement in
press publications and radio and television broadcasting in postwar France.
Sartre’s awareness of the growing power of the media to shape and influence public opinion was the motivating force underlying his interventions in the press from Combat and Le Figaro in 1944-45 to La Cause du Peuple, J’Accuse and Libération in 1970-74 and in the French state-controlled radio and television network from the `Tribune des Temps Modernes’ radio series of 1947 to the aborted Antenne 2 television history series of 1974-75.
Focused principally on the nature of the relations between intellectuals and the media, this book will appeal to those interested in the issues of freedom of expression and censorship in contemporary France.
Sartre and Nizan Essays – Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France
Michael Scriven
Jean-Paul Sartre Politics and Culture in Postwar France offers an assessment of Sartre as an exemplary figure in the evolving political and cultural landscape of post-1945 France.
Sartre’s originality is located in the tense relationship 
that he maintained between deeply held revolutionary beliefs and a residual yet critical attachment to traditional forms of cultural expression.
A series of case-studies highlights Sartre’s productively transitional status between two historical epochs: Part I, his problematical relationship with the French Communist Party during the Cold War, and his affinity to Maoist politics in the aftermath of May 1968. Part II, focused on Sartre’s cultural politics, critically reviews Sartre’s dramatisation of politics in the theatre, his ideologically motivated views of sculpture and painting, and the mediation of his political ideas in the press and in radio and television broadcasting. Overall, Jean-Paul Sartre: Politique et culture dans la France de l’après-guerre illustrates the continuing relevance and appeal of Sartre to the contemporary world.
FICTITIOUS BOOKS SARTRE and NIZAN ESSAYS
•••
Explore Michael Scriven’s fictional writings at Fictitious Books fibs and Zeb Solitanu: A Fictitious Books Blog
Learn more about Blog Fiction – follow Zeb Solitanu at Anticlockwise and SpirianA
Explore the full range of Fictitious Books at fibs, ZSol and Amazon Books
