...> 168159 CD >m Gift of YALE UNIVERSITY With the aid of the ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION 1949 OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Call No. Author %&V/S#/ 2-^ & Accession No. - . This bookihould be returned on or before the date last marked below. WHAT IS LITERATURE? JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Translated from the French by BERNARD FRECHTMAN PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY NEW YORK Copyright, 1949, by Philosophical Library, Inc. 15 EAST 40th Street, New York, N.Y. Printed in the United States of America TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword I II What Why is Writing? Write? Whom Does One Write? 7 38 III For IV Situation of the Writer in 1947 161 Index 299 67 FOREWORD want to engage yourself," writes a young imbecile, "what are you waiting for? Join the Communist Party." A great writer who engaged himself often and disengaged himself still more often, but who has forgotten, said to me, "The worst artists are the most engaged. Look "If you at the Soviet painters" "You want tres is to murder An old critic gently complained, literature. spread out insolently all Contempt for belles-let- through your review." A petty mind calls me pigheaded, which for him is evidently the highest insult. An author who barely crawled from name sometimes awakens men accuses me of not being one war to the other and whose languishing memories in old concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any number of people whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of an American...
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...Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude Chapter 1 MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned al-chemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. “Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” José...
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