Sartre, Jean-Paul

French author and philosopher. He was a leading proponent of existentialism. He published his first novel, La Nausée/Nausea (1937), followed by the trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté/Roads to Freedom (1944–45) and many plays, including Les Mouches/The Flies (1943), Huis clos/In Camera (1944), and Les Séquestrés d'Altona/The Condemned of Altona (1960). L'Etre et le néant/Being and Nothingness (1943), his first major philosophical work, sets out a radical doctrine of human freedom. In the later work Critique de la raison dialectique/Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he tried to produce a fusion of existentialism and Marxism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, which he declined.

Sartre was born in Paris, and was the long-time companion of the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir. During World War II he was a prisoner for nine months, and on his return from Germany joined the Resistance. As a founder of existentialism, he edited its journal Les Temps modernes/Modern Times, and expressed its tenets in his novels and plays. According to Sartre, people have to create their own destiny without relying on powers higher than themselves. Awareness of this freedom takes the form of anxiety, and people therefore attempt to flee from awareness into what he terms mauvaise foi (‘bad faith’); this is the theory he put forward in L'Etre et le néant. In Les Mains sales/Crime passionel (1948) he attacked aspects of communism while remaining generally sympathetic. In his later work Sartre became more sensitive to the social constraints on people's actions. He refused the Nobel Prize for ‘personal reasons’, but allegedly changed his mind later, saying he wanted it for the money.