After his father's early death Jean-Paul Sartre was brought up at his grandfather's home in a world even then eighty years out of date. In "Words", Sartre recalls growing up within the confines of French provincialism in the period before the First World War, an illusion-ridden childhood made bearable by his lively imagination and passion for reading and writing. A brilliant work of self-analysis, "Words" provides an essential background to the philosophy of one of the profoundest thinkers of the twentieth century.