Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father died when he was a baby, and he was raised partly by his grandfather, a language teacher, in whose library he read constantly. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion. He taught philosophy at secondary schools and studied in Berlin. His novel Nausea (1938) made his name. Drafted into the French army in 1939, he was captured in 1940 and held for about nine months as a prisoner of war. Back in Paris under the German occupation, he published Being and Nothingness (1943), his major philosophical work, which argues that human beings are free and responsible for creating themselves through their choices, summed up as 'existence precedes essence'. His play No Exit (1944), in which three people are trapped together after death, contains the line 'Hell is other people'. After the war he founded the journal Les Temps modernes and was active in left-wing politics. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Paris in 1980.

Jean-Paul Sartre is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: An atheist philosopher. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy