Library Journal
There are nearly 50 monographs in print on Sartre's life and writings. This slender but muscular contribution by a prolific novelist see Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood and former Oxford philosophy don attends only to Sartre's novels, giving as context the history of existentialism and Sartre's development as a political thinker. Murdoch's criticism of her subject's artistic and philosophic uses of language is particularly cogent. Still, the work is authoritative but not revolutionary, well composed but without remarkable insight. Students and scholars in the field should read it; lay readers will find it a good introduction either to Sartre or to literary criticism.Francisca Goldsmith, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco.