This paper compares three different cases made by Arab literary critics for al-adib al-multazim, “the committed author.” Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that writers must take up the call of engagement or commitment, they each inflected the concept with a different temporal orientation to reflect their sense of the action required by the anticolonial nationalist struggle. Taha Husayn rejected the concept, arguing that it did not do justice to the enduring relevance of writers from the past. Commitment would necessarily lead writers to a dogmatic and detached understanding of the present. ‘Abd al-Azim Anis and Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim criticized the tendency they saw in both Husayn and more philosophically-minded existentialists like ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi to privilege the exploration of individual interiority. Such a project could only reproduce the general cultural malaise with which they thought contemporary Egypt was beset; in its place they suggested a literature oriented toward instilling hope in readers about the possibility for a more just future. Suhayl Idris, finally, linked commitment to the now-time of the anticolonial struggle and set it against the temporizing of colonial administrators. He suggested that literature should express the individual protagonist’s break with tradition and his or her dedication to the immediate goal of self-emancipation. Husayn’s focus on the past, Anis and al-‘Alim’s future orientation, and Idris’s presentism constituted three different interpretations of the ground that should sustain the efforts of writers—and by extension political activists—in their contemporary struggles to found an autonomous sphere for themselves. In foregrounding these differences, I draw two conclusions. The first is that social realism—-associated with Anis and al-Alim’s futural disposition—-won out over Husayn’s traditional aestheticism and Idris’s novel of psychic interiority because only it seemed to offer an alternative to the generalized impasse in the present. The second is that commitment fell out of fashion not because of Sartre’s equivocations on Palestinian independence, as is usually suggested, but because all of the Arab interpretations posited a transitive rather than a reflexive notion of committed action. When good-faith efforts to realize Palestinian independence came to naught, Arab intellectuals turned to experimental aesthetics and searching self-inquiry in order to bring the subject of action into question.