French philosopher, playwright and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris June 21, 1905 to an illustrious family. His father was a decorated naval officer, his mother the cousin of the famous theologian and jungle doctor, Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned at a young age, Sartre was raised by his grandfather, in whose rich library he "found my religion: nothing seemed to me more important than a book. I regarded the library as a temple." He went to study philosophy at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure and then at Gottingen under the direction of Husserl. He taught philosophy for a few years at Le Harve in Paris but then resigned to pursue a full-time writing career.

During World War II Sartre joined the French Army but spent most of his time working on a novel and two plays, often typing in front of his commanding officers, for which he was often reprimanded. Captured by the Germans, he was a prisoner of war for eight months during which time he put on plays and gave lectures to the officers on history of German philosophy from Kant to Husserl; he escaped using papers that the German officers had themselves forged him. He returned to the French resistance and resumed his writing and finished two plays – the anti-authoritarian Les Mouches (The Flies) and Huis Clos (No Exit) - both widely regarded as masterpieces. The latter, which has become a paradigm of existentialist drama, contains the famous line "Hell is other people."During his years of education in Paris he met Simone de Beauvoir (with whom he formed a settled long term relationship without actually living together), Raymond Aron, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss and others who were later prominent in the Beaux Arts or politics.

When Sartre's philosophical work L'Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness) appeared in 1943, it was instantly heralded as a new philosophical classic. By war's end, he became the famous proponent of his atheistic brand of existentialism and a world-renown leader of the left-wing intellectuals. strongy influenced by Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Husserl, in his philosophical view atheism is taken for granted; the "loss of God" is not mourned. Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being. The meaning of man's life is not established before his existence. Once the terrible freedom is acknowledged, man has to make this meaning himself, has to commit himself to a role in this world, has to commit his freedom. And this attempt to make oneself is futile without the "solidarity" of others.

Later he became an independant socialist and later a marxist. He criticized both the USA as the USSR, although he sympathised the most with USSR ideology. But he never succeeded in combining humanist aspects of existentialism with the ideology of marxism.

Sartre is perhaps best known as a playwright. He has engaged extensively in literary critisicm and has written studies on Baudelaire (1947) and Jean Genet (1952). A biography of his childhood, Les Mots (The Words), appeared in 1964.in 1964 he won the Nobel Prize but refused to accept it on grounds that Nobel, who had made his fortune by inventing and selling dynamite, had profited from human suffering and that the prize was but another political tool of the military-industrial complex.

Jean Paul Sartre impaired his health by smoking and drinking immoderately and on April 15th 1980 he died of a smoking related complaint. More than 25,000 people lined the streets of Paris for the funeral procession on 19 April 1980. Sartre's ashes were buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Later, Simone de Beauvoir's ashes were buried next to his.

His most famous works are L'Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness) 1943, Huis Clos (No Exit), La Nausee (Nausea) 1938 and LES JEUX SONT FAITS (THE CHIPS ARE DOWN) 1947.see also: "IF YOU GO INTO EXILE..."
"life begins on the other side of despair."
* "conquer yourself rather than the world."