Sartre's early academic career included teaching in several French lycées and engaging in provocative pranks and debates. Sartre's life was marked by strong political engagement. During World War II, he was drafted, captured, and later released, after which he co-founded the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté.
Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, best known as the leading exponent of existentialism in the 20th century. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize for Literature. Learn more about Sartre’s life, works, and philosophy in this article.
Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness, summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]).
The experience of the war and the encounter with Merleau-Ponty contributed to awakening Sartre’s interest in the political dimension of human existence: Sartre thus further developed his existentialist understanding of human beings in a way which is compatible with Marxism.
What were the key ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy? This article summarizes some of Sartre’s central views and their influence on philosophy.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964 was awarded to Jean-Paul Sartre "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age"
Comprehensive biography of Jean-Paul Sartre, French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and activist, covering his life, works, and core ideas.
He counterposed to Sartre’s philosophy of freedom a Marxist view (accusing Sartre of individualism and liberalism)—but the argument was conducted in a calm and fraternal tone, very unlike Sartre’s various confrontations with members of the Communist Party.