NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Four seminal plays by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. An existential portrayal of Hell in Sartre's best-known play, as well as three other brilliant, thought-provoking works: the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict, and an arresting attack on American racism.

Sartre's major preoccupation, the struggle for freedom in a world whose orders and systems make any choices hard, is the key theme that links the three plays in this anthology.

Two women and one man are locked up together for eternity in one hideous room in Hell. The windows are bricked up, there are no mirrors, the electric lights can never be turned off, and there is no exit. The irony of this Hell is that its torture is not of the rack and fire, but of the burning humiliation of each soul as it is stripped of its pretenses by the cruel curiosity of the damned. Here the soul is shorn of secrecy, and even the blackest deeds are mercilessly exposed to the fierce light of Hell. It is an eternal torment.

The respectful prostitute. Four plays written by the French existentialist philosopher and writer addressing such topics as hell, racism, and conduct of life.

The full French text of Sartre's novel is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: 'Hell is other people'. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War, and quickly became friends, comrades, and mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived. In 1943, with Nazis patrolling the streets, Sartre and Camus sat in a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain with Simone de Beauvoir and began a discussion about life and love and literature that would pull them all together and finally tear them apart. They ended up on opposite sides in a war of words over just about everything: women, philosophy, politics. Their fraught, fractured friendship culminated in a bitter and very public feud that was described as 'the end of a love-affair' but which never really finished. Sartre was a boxer and a drug-addict; Camus was a goalkeeper who subscribed to a degree-zero approach to style and ecstasy. Sartre, obsessed with his own ugliness, took up the challenge of accumulating women; Camus, part-Bogart, part-Samurai, was also a self-confessed Don Juan who aspired to chastity. Sartre and Camus play out an epic struggle between the symbolic and the savage. But what if the friction between these two unique individuals is also the source of our own inevitable conflicts? The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camusreconstructs the intense and antagonistic relationship that was (in Sartre's terms) 'doomed to failure'. Weaving together the lives and ideas and writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Martin relives the existential drama that still binds them inseparably together and remixes a philosophical dialogue that speaks to us now.