Jean-Paul Sartre LES CHEMINS DE LA LIBERTE - TRILOGY - TWO VOLUMES INSCRIBED BY SARTRE This lot

This lot comprises the following three titles. all first editions in the original bindings and all in fine or near fine condition:

1. L'age de Raison. 1945. Gallimard. In the original brown decorated cloth covered boards. No. 547 of 1000 copies. Inscribed to Monseur Robert Moureau by Sartre on the half-title. A fine unblemished, probably unread copy. Still retains the protective cellophane dustwrapper which is somewhat frayed but has served its duty in keeping the book in fine condition. Uncommon signed.

2. Le Sursis. 1945. Gallimard. In the original cream decorated cloth covered boards. No. 18 of 1000 copies. Similarly inscribed by Sarte to Moreau on the half-title. A fine unblemished probably unread copy protected in a somewhat frayed and chipped cellophane dustwrapper. 

3. La Mort Dans L'Ame. 1949. Gallimard. In the original cream wraps printed in black and red. No. LXXXV (85) of 100 copies on Velin pur fil Lafuma Navarre paper (of a total edition of 2050 copies). All edges uncut and top edge unopened. Thus an unread copy. Apart from a 2cm. closed clean split at the junction of the spine and the front panel. this is a fine copy. 

An excellent set of this work and scarce inscribed. 

Les Chemins de la Liberté - ("Roads to Freedom" in English) is a series of novels by the Literature Nobel prize winner, Jean-Paul Sartre. Intended as a tetralogy, it was left incomplete, with only three of the planned four volumes published. The three published novels revolve around Mathieu, a Socialist teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends. The trilogy includes: L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason), Le sursis (which is generally translated as The Reprieve but could cover a number of semantic fields from 'deferment' to 'amnesty'), and La mort dans l'âme (Troubled Sleep, originally translated by Gerard Hopkins as Iron in the Soul, Hamish Hamilton, 1950). The trilogy was to be followed by a fourth novel, La dernière chance (i.e. The Last Chance); however, Sartre would never finish it: two chapters were published in 1949 in Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes under the title Drôle d'amitié. The last part of The Last Chance was later reconstructed and published in 1981. The novels were written largely in response to the events of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, and express certain significant shifts in Sartre's philosophical position towards 'engagement' (commitment) in both life and literature, finding their resolution in the extended essay L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Form of Humanism).