Jacques-Laurent Bost

Jacques-Laurent Bost (6 May 1916 – 21 September 1990) was a French journalist and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Bost was born the youngest of ten children on 6 May 1916 in Le Havre, Normandy, France to Pastor Charles Bost. One of his siblings, older brother Pierre, was a screenwriter and author and journalist Serge Lafaurie was his nephew. Bost was known as "little Bost" in the 1930s because Pierre had already made a name for himself. One of Bost's teachers at Lycée du Havre was Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he became lifelong friends. Bost was a second-class infantryman in the French Army during World War II until being injured in May/June 1940. He and Simone de Beauvoir exchanged a number of letters while he was deployed; their correspondence would later be published by Beauvoir's daughter Sylvie under the title Correspondance croisée. Following his service, for which he received a Croix de Guerre, he worked as a war correspondent for Combat. Bost came across Dachau just hours after the American troops during one of his assignments. Bost wrote for L'Express after Combat but left in 1964 to co-found L'Obs with Jean Daniel, Serge Lafaurie, K. S. Karol, and André Gorz. During his career, he also wrote for the satire weekly Le Canard enchaîné and Sartre's Les Temps modernes. At times, he published under the pseudonym Claude Tartare. Le Dernier des métiers (1946) was the only book Bost wrote and published during his life. The character Boris in Sartre's Les Chemins de la liberte is based on Bost; Beauvoir also mentioned him in La Force de l'age. In addition to being a journalist, Bost was a screenwriter and a translator. In 1947, he helped Jean Delannoy adapt a Sartre drama into the film Les jeux sont faits. He wrote scripts for Dirty Hands (1951), La Putain respectueuse (1952), Les héros sont fatigués (1955), and Oh! Que Mambo! (1959), several of which were adaptations of stories by Sartre, and dialogue for Ca va barder! (1955), El amor de Don Juan (1956), and Le vent se lève (1959). His translations include the French versions of the following English books: Little Men, Big World by William Burnett, Strictly for Cash by James Hadley Chase, This is Dynamite by Horace McCoy, The Sure Hand of God by Erskine Caldwell, Fast One by Paul Cain, How Sleeps The Beast by Don Tracy, The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter by Virgil Scott, and Lazarus #7 by Richard Sale.