La Nausée

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée, was published in Paris in April 1938. It was an immediate success and was seriously considered for the most prestigious of French literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt. In 1950, when Sartre was at the height of his fame, it was selected by a literary jury as one of the best French novels of the half century. It was then that it appeared in its first French paperback edition, the Collection Pourpre, before becoming a Gallimard Livre de Poche in 1956. It was reprinted twice within a year of its first hardback publication, and by 1988 had sold over 2 million copies. In an interview in 1964, just after he had become the first and so far the only writer to turn down the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sartre said that La Nausée was the best book he had written from a literary point of view, and most critics agree with him in seeing it as his best work of fiction.