Sartre’s Flaubert biography spanned 2,800 pages and stayed unfinished

Evidence

Sartre himself struggled to manage his immense project. Having begun to write it in 1954, he ran out of steam and put the manuscript aside for a long time, then rolled up his sleeves again and rapidly finished three volumes, which came out in 1971 and 1972. These ran to an astonishing 2,800 pages, or about 2,000 pages longer than one might expect from even the most long-winded biography. Even now, he had not finished: this took the story only to Flaubert’s writing of Madame Bovary. A fourth volume was projected, but never appeared. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 703

Categorization

• CANDY: The 2,800-page biography that only reached the writing of Madame Bovary is a fun dinner-party fact about philosophical excess.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre’s lost book on Mallarmé would have exceeded his Flaubert biography — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 298; Sartre’s Critique first volume ran nearly 400,000 words while the second went unfinished — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 854

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s lost book on Mallarmé would have exceeded his Flaubert biography #expands (0.80) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 298
• Sartre’s Critique first volume ran nearly 400,000 words while the second went unfinished #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 854