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. One of his siblings, older brother Pierre, was a screenwriter and author

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. Bost came across Dachau just hours after the American troops during one of his assignments. 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. 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. He was also part of the first performance of Picasso's Desire Caught by the Tail along with Sartre, Beauvoir, Raymond Queneau, Zanie Campan, and Dora Maar; he the part of Silence. In 1948, Bost taught philosophy at the University of Paris. He married Olga Kosakiewicz, one of the many women involved in a ménage à trois with Beauvoir and Sartre, but Bost and Beauvoir continued their affair in secret. Bost and Olga had at least one child, Bernard Edouard. Olga died in 1985.

Bost died from cancer on 21 September 1990 in Paris.