Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father died when he was an infant, and he grew up in the book-filled household of his maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German. At the École normale supérieure he formed a lifelong partnership with Simone de Beauvoir. After teaching philosophy at lycées and studying phenomenology in Berlin in 1933–34, he published Nausea (1938), in which a solitary historian is overwhelmed by the raw, unjustified existence of things.

Taken prisoner in 1940 and released the following year, he wrote Being and Nothingness (1943), the central text of French existentialism, which argued that human beings are condemned to be free and must create meaning through their choices. Plays such as The Flies and No Exit, with its line that hell is other people, carried his ideas to wide audiences, and after the Liberation he founded the review Les Temps modernes with Beauvoir and others. Increasingly political, he sought to reconcile existentialism with Marxism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, while his relationship to the Communist Party moved between alliance and rupture. His autobiography of childhood, Words, is among the finest prose he wrote.

In 1964 Sartre declined the Nobel Prize, explaining that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution; he had earlier refused other official honours. He remained a figure of public engagement, opposing the wars in Algeria and Vietnam and supporting the students of 1968. Nearly blind in his last years, he died in Paris in 1980; tens of thousands of people followed his funeral procession.