Being and Nothingness was "a pretentious metaphysical thesis" and "principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'." The philosopher William Barrett, writing in "Irrational Man" (1958), described "Being and Nothingness" as "a great, uneven, brilliant and verbose tome". He noted Sartre's debts to Heidegger, but nevertheless credited him with originality. He criticized Sartre for neglecting Heidegger's "notion of the truth of Being", his understanding of what it means for a subject or object to be. In his view, Sartre failed to "deal with the problem of truth in a radical and existential way", instead viewing truth in "the ordinary intellectualistic sense that
Being and Nothingness has been traditional with non-existential philosophers" and thereby remaining a Cartesian rationalist. Susan Sontag, writing in an essay in "The Supplement" to the "Columbia Spectator" that was later published in "Against Interpretation" (1966), praised Sartre's discussions of the body and concrete relations with others, identifying them as part of a French tradition of serious thought about problems of fundamental importance. John B. Vickery wrote that Sartre's work resembles Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890) in the way its author "merges psychology and the concrete sense of fiction", although he considered it less readable than Frazer's work. The philosopher