Sartre’s biographies all ask what makes a writer a writer

Evidence

Like Genet, Sartre also had a more powerful way of taking control: he wrote books. For both of them, being a writer meant giving the world’s contingencies the ‘necessary’ quality of art, just as the jazz singer in Nausea turns the chaos of being into beautiful necessity. All Sartre’s biographies turn on this theme. In his 1947 study of Baudelaire, he shows us the young poet bullied at school but transforming his miseries into literature. The same thing happens in Words, which Sartre began drafting the year after publishing Saint Genet, in 1953. His driving question, he said in a later interview, was: ‘how does a man become someone who writes, who wants to speak of the imaginary?’ Words was his attempt to find out what makes a child like himself fall into the ‘neurosis of literature’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 697

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the existentialist theme of contingency-versus-necessity already established in discussions of Nausea; Sartre frames writing as the transformation of contingency into necessity. — connects to: Sartre’s conviction that life and philosophy coincide drove his biographical writing — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 53
• DEFINE: Clarifies Sartre’s core biographical method: tracing the origin of a writer’s vocation, treating writing as a means of rescuing chaotic existence.