Ferrymen for Modernity: Coindreau and Sartre

Abstract

If there is, as Sartre said, a modern American literature for the French, whose central figure is Faulkner, and a school of Les Temps Modernes that found its inspiration in it, it is because there was a translator, Maurice Edgar Coindreau, who set himself the task of choosing the most prominent authors of American modernism, of translating and promoting them, and a critic who knew what he wanted and what course French literature was supposed to steer, Jean-Paul Sartre. Here we attempt to identify the choices and possibly biases that have marked this transatlantic relation.