Sartre's Parisian apartment was maintained as accurately as it was to show the lifestyle that he and Simone de Beauvoir led during the tumultuous post-war, avant-garde period. Sartre's ideas on authorship represent one of the last significant statements from an era in which it was felt that the social engagement of the author offered the potential for genuine political change. Since, for Sartre, the self is never determined, authorship extends beyond the text to govern the individual's fundamental mode of being-in-the-world. In "Writing for One's Age" Sartre outlines the seemingly paradoxical notion that historical groundedness gives rise to a literature all the more reflective of the absolute.

This is the measure we propose to the writer: as long as his books arose anger, discomfort, shame, hatred, love, even if he is no more than a shade, he will live.

"Books" here may be replaced by "Hypertext fiction" during a peripatetic's travel. Still, Sartre's meaning continue to remind us of the unchanging persistence between authorship and mortality.