Jean-Paul Sartre - As Palavras

Jean-Paul Sartre was a toddler when his father died.

He believes this event definitively shaped his life: while his mother was chained to the sad role of a young widow, he grew up free, adored by all, especially welcomed by a devoted grandfather who opened the doors of his library to him and invited him to explore it.

"I began my life as I will probably end it: in the midst of books," we read in these pages published a few months before the Swedish Academy announced Sartre's Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964.

Evoking provincial France in the period preceding the First World War and a childhood given over to boundless imagination, fueled by reading and the discovery of writing, *The Words* is simultaneously a portrait of a time, a reflection on the place of books and language in the construction of human experience, and a brilliant self-analysis by one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.