What Is Literature? What Is Literature? What Is Literature? (), also published as "Literature and Existentialism",) is an essay by French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Gallimard in 1948. Initially published in freestanding essays across French literary journals "Les Temps modernes", "Situations I" and "Situations II", essays "What is Writing?" and "Why Write?" were translated into English and published by the Paris-based literary journal Transition 1948. The English translation by Bernard Frechtman was published in 1950. Sartre attempts to devise an understanding of the effect literature has on those who are subjected to it. In the foreword Sartre addresses his critics
What Is to Be Done? (novel) based on his own ideas of moral responsibility. Vladimir Lenin, however, found it inspiring and named a 1902 pamphlet "What Is To Be Done?". Lenin is said to have read the book five times in one summer, and according to Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Joseph Frank, 'Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's "Capital", supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.' The novel mentions (in the 4th dream of Vera Pavlovna) aluminium as the "metal of the future". In fact aluminium became widely used only starting with World War I (1914).