The Aftermath of War brings together essays written in Sartre’s most creative period, just after World War II. Sartre’s extraordinary range of engagement is manifest, with writings on post-war America, the social impact of war in Europe, contemporary philosophy, race, and avant garde art. Carefully structured into sections, the essays range across Sartre’s reflections on collaboration, resistance and liberation in post-war Europe, his thoughts and observations after his extended trip to the USA in 1945, an examination of the failings of philosophical materialism, his analysis of the new revolutionary poetry of ‘negritude’, and his meditations on the visual arts, with essays on the work of Giacometti and Calder, both of whom Sartre knew well.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a novelist, playwright, biographer and undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century. The emblematic French thinker of his generation, his hugely influential writings range across philosophy, novels, stories, plays and political pamphlets and include Being and Nothingness, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Nausea, The Words, The Flies and No Exit