Sartre, Jean-Paul

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80) French philosopher and writer. Sartre was the leading advocate of existentialism. His debut novel, Nausea (1939), depicted man adrift in a godless universe, hostage to his own angst-ridden freedom. Sartre was a fighter in the French Resistance during World War 2. During the war, he began to write plays, such as Huis Clos (No Exit) (1944). His major philosophical work is Being and Nothingness (1943). After the war, Sartre wrote a trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom (1945–49), and founded (1945) the philosophy periodical Modern Times. His complex relationship with Marxism is explored in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Sartre refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature on ‘personal’ grounds, but is later said to have accepted it. He had a long-term relationship with Simone de Beauvoir.