Last reviewed: June 2017
French dramatist, novelist, philosopher, editor, and critic
June 21, 1905
Paris, France
April 15, 1980
Paris, France
Philosopher, playwright, novelist, editor, and critic, Jean-Paul Sartre dominated European intellectual life for two decades following World War II. He was born in Paris on June 21, 1905, the son of a naval engineer, Jean-Baptiste, who died when the child was only fifteen months old. His mother, Anne-Marie, took the child with her to live with her parents, the Schweitzers, in Alsace, where, as later recounted in his autobiography The Words, the boy felt that he was the center of the universe. Yet his idyll was dispelled when, at the age of ten, he was sent to a Paris school and, a year later, his adored mother was remarried.
A brilliant and contentious student of philosophy, Sartre was thirty-three years old when his first literary work was published. He taught philosophy in a lycée in provincial Le Havre, where, despondent over aging in obscurity, he began writing the meditation on solitude that evolved into the short, spare, and challenging novel Nausea. This fictive diary of a solitary, unsuccessful biographer traumatized by his discovery of the contingency of any life remained Sartre’s greatest achievement in fiction; however, contemptuous of art’s evasions, he was later to repudiate it, as well as the short stories in The Wall, and Other Stories and the three completed volumes of a projected tetralogy entitled The Roads to Freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964.
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Mobilized at the outbreak of World War II and captured by the Germans, Sartre wrote his first plays and began to develop ideas on solidarity and freedom while in prison camp. After his release, Sartre spent most of the war years in Paris, writing prolifically. As editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he cofounded in 1944, and as literary and political gadfly, Sartre became the celebrated center of a group of influential Left Bank intellectuals. Not least of these was Simone de Beauvoir, the pioneer feminist he had met before the war who became his devoted companion for some fifty years, though they rejected marriage and each pursued affairs with others.
While France was still under the German occupation, Sartre wrote stage works that dramatized human beings in urgent situations requiring the enlightened exercise of freedom. Though it makes use of ancient myth, The Flies, for example, was a call to French audiences to take responsibility for their subjection to a foreign power. Also produced during the Occupation was Sartre’s most frequently performed play, No Exit, a drama set in Hell about three characters who each choose an inauthentic identity. No Exit became popular abroad as well, being named best foreign play by the New York Drama Critics' Circle for 1946–47. After the war, Sartre continued to use theater to promulgate his philosophical and political ideas.
A prominent public figure who eventually abandoned fiction and theater for polemics and political action, Sartre traveled throughout the world, arousing controversy with his attacks on Soviet and American policies. He supported Algerian and Israeli independence and condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the American war in Vietnam, and South African apartheid. In 1964, shortly after publication of The Words, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet, in a dramatic gesture motivated by scorn for what he viewed as the coercive categories of bourgeois society, Sartre refused to accept the prestigious award. He courted controversy again in 1968, when, during the Paris student rebellion, Sartre defied arrest in supporting youthful radicals. In failing health for the last two decades of his life, Sartre became a living icon. He was still at work on his massive, obsessive biography of Gustave Flaubert when he died, of uremia, on April 15, 1980.
A number of other works of his were published posthumously. These have included a screenplay about psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, a critique of nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and a book on morality and ethics, as well as volumes of Sartre's correspondence, his diaries from World War II, and collections of his early writings.
Dubbed the Pope of Existentialism, Sartre was the acknowledged leader of an extremely fashionable but elusive movement in modern philosophy. Raymond Aaron, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were among others associated with the school, and they were also companions with whom the truculent Sartre eventually had quarrels. Being and Nothingness, his most thorough and systematic statement of existentialist philosophy, is a forbiddingly dense, copious examination of key concepts, including those of contingency, consciousness, and bad faith. Existentialism, originally a lecture Sartre gave to defend and popularize his ideas, is a more accessible version of the existentialist credo. Existentialism attracted fierce devotion from acolytes and vehement rage from others, but Sartre refused to be typecast even in a philosophy opposed to categories. Others of his many writings also blended Marxist and Freudian ideas.
Sartre delighted in his own metamorphoses, his numerous shifts of approach, activity, and opinion. A stubborn man of enormous and varied energies arrayed in battle against the complacencies of middle-class conventions, he was proudly tendentious. Many others, including his detractors, saw him as he saw himself: as the conscience of a nation and an era. Beyond Sartre’s seminal work in fiction, philosophy, and theater, the cunning dialectician and official dissident will be remembered for the range of his accomplishments and for the awesome role of intellectual that he defined for himself and for others.