Margins
2007
First Published
3.63
Average Rating
223
Number of Pages

Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Sartre’s Typhus centres on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nightclub singer, whose partner succumbs to the typhus epidemic sweeping the country. Though it does not shy from the explosive issues of colonialism and race that are implicit in its setting, Typhus is both a turbulent love story in the best traditions of Western popular cinema and an existentialist tale of moral redemption that shares many fascinating parallels with Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. Jean-Paul Sartre penned the screenplay Typhus in 1943–44 as a commission for French film-makers Pathé, who were planning a post-war production. However, the film was never made, though Yves Allégret’s 1953 film The Proud Ones retains some distant echoes of Sartre’s original script. The script was lost for nearly sixty years before being rediscovered and published in French in 2007. This first English publication will be essential for fans of Sartre and twentieth-century French literature and postwar film. “One of the most brilliant and versatile writers as well as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century.”—The Times (UK) “Jean-Paul Sartre dominated the intellectual life of 20th-century France to an extraordinary degree.”—Tom Bishop, New York Times

Avg Rating
3.63
Number of Ratings
54
5 STARS
19%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
31%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Author · 83 books

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy. He declined the award of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." In the years around the time of his death, however, existentialism declined in French philosophy and was overtaken by structuralism, represented by Levi-Strauss and, one of Sartre's detractors, Michel Foucault.

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved