Pompous, tendentious, superficial and inaccurate, What is Literature? is very far from being one of Sartre's better works. On the last page he ingenuously remarks: 'I have no wish to tell writers of my generation what they ought to do. What right have I to do so, and who has invited my opinion? And I have no taste for literary manifestoes.' Nevertheless, the cavalier dismissal of anyone whose work does not satisfy his criteria—from Molière to Gide, and from the author of The Song of Roland to the Surrealists—gives the work a distinctly sectarian flavour. His identification of good prose with democracy is quite arbitrary—what about Pascal or Bossuet?—and his use of the word 'liberty' is vague in the extreme. To put all English writers safely into clubs and state that America has no middle class are quite delightful, but provide only...