The Words

Sartre's 1964 autobiography 'Les Mots' — early childhood through the discovery of writing

Tradition: French existentialism / autobiography / mid-century European memoir

Sartre's 1964 'Les Mots' — autobiographical reckoning with bookishness and bourgeois childhood

Published by Gallimard in 1964 (the year Sartre was awarded — and refused — the Nobel Prize in Literature), 'Les Mots' is Sartre's autobiography of his early childhood in the Schweitzer household in Paris. Sartre lost his father at fifteen months; the book traces his bookish origins — the grandfather Charles Schweitzer's library (where Sartre would 'sit for hours, perched on books' before he could read), the absent father, the indulgent maternal grandparents, the early discovery of reading and writing as substitute religion. The autobiography is divided into two parts: 'Lire' (Reading) and 'Écrire' (Writing); both narrate the constitution of a literary vocation. Sartre's ironic-critical method is to treat his own intellectual self-formation as a case study in bourgeois neurosis: the child whom the family casts as a young Pascal, the family's chosen-one mythology, the discovery that writing was the family's deepest substitute for religion. The book's final lines — 'I have given up the office and the priesthood, but I have not lost the orders... My whole life has been mortified... I am a man who awakes, fixed at a high regret on a low road of suffering... I become what I am, a whole and harmonic man unaccustomed to himself' — record Sartre's late-existentialist self-disposition. The book is the most accessible Sartre and his most-praised purely literary work; some critics consider it his finest single book.