With this volume, the University of Chicago Press completes its translation of a work that is of interest not only to serious readers of Flaubert but to anyone interested in the last major contribution by one of the twentieth century´s greatest thinkers. Critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel or biography or criticism-fiction which is the summation of Sartre´s philosophical, social, and literary thought. In the preface, Sartre writes: The Family Idiot is the sequel to Search for a Method. The subject: what, at this point in time, can we know about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case. Sartre discusses Flaubert´s personal development, his relationship to his family, his decision to become a writer, and the psychosomatic crisis or conversion from his father´s domination to the freedom of his art. Sartre blends psychoanalysis with a sociological study of the ideology of the period, the crisis in literature, and Flaubert´s influence on the future of literature. In this fifth and last volume of the English translation, corresponding to the whole of Volume 3 of the French edition, Sartre demonstrates how Flaubert´s personal neurosis coincided with the demands of his time for an art neurosis, or a literature of disengagement and demoralization. While Sartre never wrote the final volume he envisioned for this vast project, the existing volumes constitute in themselves a unified work.