Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905 and died there on 15 April 1980. He became the best-known French philosopher of the twentieth century, and the leading voice of existentialism, the view that people are free and must make their own meaning without a fixed human nature to rely on. He studied in Paris, taught for a time, and rose to fame after the Second World War, when his ideas reached a wide public through lectures, journalism and the magazine he helped found.

Sartre wrote in many forms: novels, short stories, plays, essays, biography and large philosophical works. His writing explores freedom, responsibility, choice and how we live alongside other people. He was also a political figure, often involved in public debates on war, colonialism and the left. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and declined it. His work still shapes how readers think about personal freedom.