b. June 21, 1905, Paris, France
d. April 15, 1980, Paris

Early life and writings

Sartre lost his father at an early age and grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, uncle of the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer and himself professor of German at the Sorbonne. The boy, who wandered in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris in search of playmates, was small in stature and cross-eyed. His brilliant autobiography, Les Mots (1963; Words, 1964), narrates the adventures of the mother and child in the park as they went from group to group--in the vain hope of being accepted--then finally retreated to the sixth floor of their apartment "on the heights where (the) dreams dwell." "Thb. July 3,

Sartre went to the Lyc�e Henri IV in Paris and, later on, after the remarriage of his mother, to the lyc�e in La Rochelle. From there he went to the prestigious �cole Normale Sup�rieure, from which he was graduated in 1929. Sartre resisted what he called "bourgeois marriage," but while still a student he formed with Simone de Beauvoir a union that remained a settled partnership in life. Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs, M�moires d'une jeune fille rang�e (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1959) and La Force de l'�ge (1960; The Prime of Life, 1962), provide an intimate account of Sartre's life from student years until his middle 50s. It was also at the �cole Normale Sup�rieure and at the Sorbonne that he met several persons who were destined to be writers of great fame; among these were Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Mounier, Jean Hippolyte, and Claude L�vi-Strauss. From 1931 until 1945 Sartre taught in the lyc�es of Le Havre, Laon, and, finally, Paris. Twice this career was interrupted, once by a year of study in Berlin and the second time when Sartre was drafted in 1939 to serve in World War II. He was made prisoner in 1940 and released a year later.

During his years of teaching in Le Havre, Sartre published La Naus�e (1938; Nausea, 1949), his first claim to fame. This novel, written in the form of a diary, narrates the feeling of revulsion that a certain Roquentin undergoes when confronted with the world of matter--not merely the world of other people but the very awareness of his own body. According to some critics, La Naus�e must be viewed as a pathological case, a form of neurotic escape. Most probably it must be appreciated also as a most original, fiercely individualistic, antisocial piece of work, containing in its pages many of the philosophical themes that Sartre later developed.

Sartre took over the phenomenological method, which proposes careful, unprejudiced description rather than deduction, from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and used it with great skill in three successive publications: L'Imagination (1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique, 1962), Esquisse d'une th�orie des �motions (1939; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 1962), and L'Imaginaire: Psychologie ph�nom�nologique de l'imagination (1940; The Psychology of Imagination, 1950). But it was above all in L'�tre et le n�ant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956) that Sartre revealed himself as a master of outstanding talent. Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness (n�ant), in opposition to being, or thingness (�tre). Consciousness is not-matter and by the same token escapes all determinism. The message, with all the implications it contains, is a hopeful one; yet the incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless makes the book tragic as well.