8 - American Ideas in the European Imagination

Summary

By the time Jean-Paul Sartre first visited the United States in the winter of 1945, he was already fascinated by American culture. A bookish child, he had grown up reading not only French classics but also American detective novels; he romanticized the Wild West along with medieval France. While teaching in a lycée in Le Havre in 1931–1932, he discovered the fiction of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, whom he described in an essay six years later as “the greatest writer of our time.” Like many Europeans experiencing the United States for the first time, Sartre saw much to like and much to loathe. New York City, he wrote in 1945, “is for far-sighted people, people who can focus on infinity.” Sartre and his fellow French visitors were put up at the Plaza and welcomed in New York by members of the École Libre des Hautes Études, which had already greeted many French and German émigrés fleeing the Third Reich. During their eight-week stay, the French guests of the US government traveled to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and rural Georgia, and – from a plane swooping too close for comfort – marveled at the Grand Canyon.