Iris Murdoch "Sartre : Romantic Rationalist" (Vintage)
Murdoch's short, insightful book offers a view not just of Satre's philosophy or his writing, but of these taken together to the point where the subject of the book is something more like Sartre's "outlook," where the man and his work sometimes even function as a stand-in for existentialism and a style of response to the modern world.
Murdoch focuses primarily on Satre's novels, using them as a way to grasp Sartre's positive vision for how we are to live in the world as envisaged by the existentialist, where man [sic] is an absolute value, positing value and seeking an impossible ("man is a useless passion") condition of wholeness in an inhospitable world.
The argument occasionally veers in the polemical, but only barely, and this was fine with me since she articulates well the shortcomings of Sartrean existentialism. The only time I disagreed with her was when she claimed his plays fell less victim to the "thesis first, then the art" problem that plagues his novels.
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