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Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980) was a
French existentialist
philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic.
Jean Paul Sartre
His longtime companion was Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met
at the École Normale Supérieure in 1929.
There were two main periods in his career. The first period was defined by his work Being and Nothingness. He believed in the fundamental freedom of human beings and reflected on what he saw as the unbearable nature of that freedom.
In the second major period in his career, Sartre was known as a politically engaged intellectual. He embraced Communism, though he never officially joined the Communist party. Sartre spent much of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas, which
claimed that one must self-determine one's existence, with Communist principles, which taught that socioeconomic forces beyond
one's control play a critical role in determining the course of one's life.
Major works:
- Nausea (La Nausée), 1938
- The Wall (Le Mur), 1939
- Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le
Néant), 1943
- Existentialism and Humanism,
1946
- Anti-Semite and
Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive), 1943
- Critique of Dialectical
Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique)
- No Exit (Huis-Clos), 1944
- The Roads to
Freedom (Les Chemins de la liberté) trilogy, comprising of:
- The Words (les
Mots), 1964 - autobiographical
- The Flies, a
play (Les Mouches), 1943
- "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
note: see the French version of this article for a more
complete list of works
Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but refused it.
He is buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse,
in Paris, France. There were 50,000 people
present at his funeral.
Bibliography
- Heiner Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from the German by N. Weitemeier
& J. Yacar, Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture philosophique), Paris 2001.
- H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen
1996.
External link
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