Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, novelist and critic.
His longtime companion was Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met at the École Normale Supérieure in 1929.
There were two main periods in his career. The first period was defined by his work Being and Nothingness. He believed in the fundamental freedom of human beings and reflected on what he saw as the unbearable nature of that freedom.
In the second major period in his career, Sartre was known as a politically engaged intellectual. He embraced Communism, though he never officially joined the Communist party. Sartre spent much of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas, which claimed that one must self-determine one's existence, with Communist principles, which taught that socioeconomic forces beyond one's control play a critical role in determining the course of one's life.
Major works:
- Nausea (La Nausée), 1938
- The Wall (Le Mur), 1939
- Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le Néant), 1943
- "Existentialism is a Humanism", 1946
- Anti-Semite and Jew
- Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique)
- No Exit (Huis-Clos), 1944
- The Words (les Mots), 1964 - autobiographical
- The Flies, a play (Les Mouches), 1943
- "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but refused it.
He is buried in Cimetiere de Montparnasse, in Paris, France.
