ABSTRACT
The keynote speaker at the 2011 UK Sartre Society Conference in London was Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre’s foremost biographer and author of the magnificent Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Cohen-Solal 2005). Her chosen theme was a series of public lectures Sartre gave in the early 1930s, during his time as a school teacher in Le Havre. Sartre’s time in Le Havre has been characterized as his wilderness years – the brilliant student of the prestigious Parisian École Normale Supérieure exiled to the provinces, unappreciated, unpublished and unhappy. Yet they were also hugely formative and creative years for Sartre: a nine-month sabbatical in Berlin in 1933 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the incessant revising of a work on contingency that eventually became the classic existentialist novel Nausea (Sartre 1938, 1965a).
