French philosopher, playwrite and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was born in Paris 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 promptly resumed his writing and finished two plays - The Flies and 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."

When Sartre's massive philosophical work 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. 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.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)