Jean-Paul Sartre

Born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre lost his father, a naval officer, at the age of two and was raised by his mother and his maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a German-language teacher and uncle of Albert Schweitzer, who filled the household with books and instilled in the boy a precocious literary ambition. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir in 1929; they began an open relationship that would last fifty-one years and reshape French intellectual life. He taught philosophy at several lycées before the war, published the novel Nausea (1938), a landmark of existentialist fiction, and was drafted in 1939, captured by the Germans in 1940, and released the following year. He co-founded the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté and wrote the play No Exit (1944), whose declaration that "hell is other people" became the most quoted line in modern philosophy. Being and Nothingness (1943), his principal philosophical work, argued that existence precedes essence and that human beings are "condemned to be free." After the war he co-founded the journal Les Temps modernes, championed anti-colonial movements, condemned French policies in Algeria, and opposed American intervention in Vietnam. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and refused it, saying that a writer should not allow himself to become an institution. Despite declining health and near-total blindness in his final decade, he continued writing and agitating. He died on April 15, 1980, in Paris. Fifty thousand mourners followed his coffin to Montparnasse Cemetery.