Opening the final chapter of his Saint Genet, a study of the life and work of Jean Genet, now appearing in English translation after a delay of almost a dozen years,1 Sartre explains:

I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality …. to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases; to learn the choice that a writer makes of himself, of his life and of the meaning of the universe, including even the formal characteristics of his style and composition and of the particularity of his tastes; to review in detail the history of his liberation. …2

He has no sooner completed this announcement than he admits to a “certain scruple”: