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Most of Sartre's literary output reflects his existentialism, although in 1960 he began writing a four-volume study of Gustave Flaubert that combines Marxist and Freudian approaches. In his first novel, NauseaBeing and Nothingness. In the most famous part of the novel, Roquentin comes up against the impenetrableness of things in the form of a gnarled old chestnut tree root, whose opaqueness to his understanding eventually demonstrates to him the ultimate absurdity of an existence that cannot be analyzed. In subsequent works, particularly his short stories in Intimacy (1939; Eng. trans., 1949), his other novels, and his plays, Sartre presents the ethical dilemmas generated by one's commitment to a course of action, usually political action. This is particularly clear in the three novels that are collectively entitled The Roads To Freedom (1945-49; Eng. trans., 1947-50).

Similar dilemmas occur in his dramas Dirty Hands (1948; Eng. trans., 1949) and The Condemned of Altona (1959; Eng. trans., 1961), both of which take up the problem of responsible political action and end with the suicide of the main character. But Sartre's most popular play is undoubtedly the one-act drama No Exit (1944; Eng. trans., 1947), which is a discussion of such familiar negative existentialist themes as bad faith, self-destruction, and the impossibility of interpersonal relationships. It is in this play that Sartre's famous line, "Hell is other people," occurs.

Sartre also wrote numerous essays about literature. He argued in What Is Literature? (1948; Eng. trans., 1949) that literature must be political, and he devoted his journal Les Temps Modernes to this point of view. He wrote essays about William Faulkner (1938), Charles Baudelaire (1946), and Jean Genet (1952). His essays on Baudelaire and Genet employ the technique of existential psychoanalysis, a term coined by Sartre to describe discerning, from the details in a person's life, the nature of the fundamental project that animates him or her, and how the project came into being. ---Thomas E. Wren