A short life of the author
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905–1980) was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris, the son of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer who died when Jean-Paul was fifteen months old, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, whose uncle was Albert Schweitzer. He was raised by his maternal grandparents in an intensely bookish household — his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, was a professor of German — and later described his childhood in The Words (1964), one of the finest literary autobiographies of the century.
Life and Career
Sartre was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and the École Normale Supérieure (1924–1929), where he met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion, intellectual partner, and fellow existentialist. Their relationship — open, unconventional, fiercely intellectual — was one of the defining partnerships of twentieth-century intellectual life.
Sartre taught philosophy at lycées in Le Havre and Paris, studied phenomenology in Berlin (1933–1934, where he absorbed Husserl and Heidegger), and published his first novel, Nausea (La Nausée, 1938), a philosophical fiction about a man’s confrontation with the absurdity of existence. The short story collection The Wall (Le Mur, 1939) followed. Both were critically acclaimed and established Sartre as a major literary voice.
During the Second World War, Sartre was mobilised, captured, and held as a prisoner of war (1940–1941). After his release he returned to Paris and participated, to a degree that has been debated ever since, in the Resistance. The occupation years were extraordinarily productive: Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant, 1943), his major philosophical work, laid out the foundations of existentialism — the doctrine that “existence precedes essence,” that human beings are radically free, and that freedom entails absolute responsibility. The plays The Flies (Les Mouches, 1943) and No Exit (Huis clos, 1944) — whose famous line “Hell is other people” has been quoted ever since — established Sartre as the most important dramatist in France.
After the war, Sartre became the most famous intellectual in the world. He founded the journal Les Temps modernes (1945), delivered the lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946) to packed audiences, and engaged in a series of increasingly bitter political commitments — supporting Communism, breaking with Camus over the question of revolutionary violence, championing third-world liberation movements, opposing the Algerian and Vietnam wars. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and declined it, saying that a writer must refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution.
His later philosophical work — Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), The Family Idiot (1971–1972, a massive study of Flaubert) — attempted to reconcile existentialism with Marxism. He went blind in the 1970s but continued to work through dictation. He died on 15 April 1980 in Paris. An estimated 50,000 people followed his funeral cortège through the streets.
Major Works and Themes
Sartre’s work spans philosophy, fiction, drama, criticism, and political journalism, unified by the central existentialist insight: human beings are “condemned to be free” — there is no God, no human nature, no predetermined essence that determines what we must be. We are what we make of ourselves, and the anguish of that freedom is inescapable.
Nausea (1938) dramatises this insight through Antoine Roquentin’s terrifying encounter with the sheer contingency of existence — the realisation that things simply are, without reason or justification. The novel’s prose — dense, phenomenologically precise — captures the experience of consciousness confronting a world stripped of meaning.
No Exit (1944) is his most famous play: three characters locked in a room in Hell discover that their punishment is each other. The play’s construction is flawless — ninety minutes, no intermission, no escape.
Being and Nothingness (1943) is the philosophical foundation: a 700-page phenomenological ontology that analyses human consciousness, freedom, bad faith (self-deception), and the look of the Other. It is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Sartre was the most influential intellectual of the postwar era. Existentialism penetrated every aspect of mid-century culture — literature, cinema, jazz, visual art, political thought. His influence on subsequent philosophy (particularly through his students and critics: Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida) is enormous, even when it takes the form of reaction against existentialism.
His literary reputation has fluctuated. The novels and plays are less widely read than they were, but Nausea and No Exit remain canonical. His political judgments — particularly his long defence of Stalinist Communism — have been heavily criticised. But his central philosophical contribution — the insistence on human freedom and responsibility — remains as powerful and as challenging as when he first articulated it.
Key Works
- Nausea (1938)
- The Wall (1939)
- Being and Nothingness (1943)
- The Flies (1943)
- No Exit (1944)
- Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
- The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945–1949)
- Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)
- The Words (1964)
Collecting Sartre
Sartre is collected primarily in French first editions, with the Gallimard Nouvelle Revue Française editions forming the core of any serious collection.
La Nausée (1938, Gallimard, Paris) is the key title. First editions with the NRF band are scarce and bring $2,000–$8,000. L’Être et le néant (1943, Gallimard) first editions bring $1,000–$5,000. Huis clos (1945, Gallimard) first editions bring $500–$2,000.
English-language first editions — Nausea (1949, New Directions; 1962 Hamish Hamilton with new Baldick translation), Being and Nothingness (1956, Philosophical Library, New York, translated by Hazel Barnes) — are collected as secondary targets.
Sartre signed material is available. He was a public intellectual who signed books, manifestos, and petitions regularly. Signed copies of his major works bring moderate premiums. His correspondence with Beauvoir and others is of high literary and philosophical value. Letters surface at French auction houses and bring $500–$5,000.