Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Roads to Freedom, titled Les chemins de la liberté in French, is a series of novels by Sartre intended as a tetralogy. Three complete volumes were published: The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Troubled Sleep. A fourth volume was left unfinished and partially reconstructed after Sartre's death.
Sartre's biographer Ronald Hayman theorized that Sartre deeply disliked bringing anything to a conclusion, and that long-term projects were tarnished by ambivalence as other work competed for his attention. In a 1973 interview, Sartre also described a fundamental falseness in autobiographical fiction, saying the differences between himself and the character Mathieu accumulated into dishonesty. Michel Contat further suggests that near the end of 1953, Sartre's decision to write an autobiography effectively displaced the unfinished novel.
The Age of Reason and The Reprieve were published together in September 1945. Troubled Sleep appeared in 1949. Two chapters of the unfinished fourth volume were published in Les Temps Modernes in 1949, and the reconstructed full fourth volume appeared in the Pléiade edition in 1981. Craig Vasey's English translation of the fourth volume was published in 2009.
Mathieu was based on Sartre himself. Ivich was based on Olga Kosakiewicz, a student of Simone de Beauvoir. Boris was drawn from Sartre's friend Jacques-Laurent Bost. Gomez was based on Fernando Gerassi, and Sarah on Stephania Avdykovych. Marcelle was perhaps loosely based on de Beauvoir, though she was the character most removed from her real-life model.
David Turner adapted the trilogy for BBC Television in 1970 as a thirteen-part serial. Michael Bryant played Mathieu and James Cellan Jones directed. The production was nominated for several BAFTA awards for 1970 but was not broadcast after 1977. The British Film Institute screened the full series over the weekend of 12-the 13th of May 2012, and in 2022 it was announced it would be repeated on BBC4.
The trilogy reflects several of Sartre's existentialist concepts, including bad faith or self-deception, the anguish that accompanies the acknowledgment of freedom, and personal responsibility for one's actions. The novels also trace Sartre's shift toward political engagement, moving from prewar Parisian characters absorbed in personal concerns to the collective crisis of the Munich Agreement and the fall of France.