in: Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 46

by Jean-Paul Sartre

French novelist, playwright, philosopher, and editor, Jean-Paul Sartre here describes the impact of those American novelists — Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Dos Passos — who have had a formative influence upon the young French authors. The essay was translated for us by Miss Evelyn de Solis.

1

There is one American literature for Americans and another for the French. In France the general reader knows Babbitt and Gone With the Wind, but these books have had no influence on French literature. The greatest literary development in France between 1999 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck. The choice of these authors, many people have told me, was due to Professor Maurice Coindreau of Princeton, who sent us their works in translation with excellent prefaces.

But a selection by any one man is effective only if he foresees the demands of the collective group to which he addresses himself. With Coindreau as intermediary, the French public selected the works it needed. It is true that these authors have not had in France a popular success comparable to that of Sinclair Lewis. Their influence was far more restricted, but infinitely more profound. We needed them and not your famous Dreiser. To writers of my generation, the publication of The 42nd Parallel, Light in August, A Farewell to Arms, evoked a revolution similar to the one produced fifteen years earlier in Europe by the Ulysses of James Joyce. Their reception was prepared for by the excellent Bridge of San Luis Rey of Thornton Wilder.

It seemed to us suddenly that we had just learned something and that our literature was about to pull itself out of its old ruts. At once, for thousands of young intellectuals, the American novel took its place, together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States. America became for us the country of Faulkner and Dos Passos, just as it had already been the home of Louis Armstrong, King Vidor, the Blues. The large frescoes of Vidor joined with the passion and violence of The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary to compose for us the face of the United States – a face tragic, cruel, and sublime. Malraux wrote in a famous preface, "The novels of Faulkner are eruptions of Greek tragedy in the detective story."

What fascinated us all really – petty bourgeois that we were, sons of peasants securely attached to the earth of our farms, intellectuals entrenched in Paris for life – was the constant flow of men across a whole continent, the exodus of an entire village to the orchards of California, the hopeless wanderings of the hero in Light in August, and of the uprooted people who drifted along at the mercy of the storms in The 42end Parallel, the dark murderous fury which sometimes swept through an entire city, the blind and criminal love in the novels of James Cain.

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