Jean Paul Sartre

Born on June 21, 1905 in France, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre is a political activist, novelist, screenwriter, philosopher and playwright. He is also a literary critic and biographer. Sartre was a major player in existentialism. He is a leading 20th century writer in both philosophy and Marxism.
Sartre's work has influenced critical theory and literary studies. He is celebrated for his open association with the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. The Nobel Prize in Literature was offered to Sartre in 1964. He refused the honor stating writers are not institutions.
In WWII Sartre served as a meteorologist in the French army. He was captured by German troops in 1940 and spent nine months as a prisoner of war. He wrote Bariona, fils du tonnerre while incarcerated. He returned to Paris in 1941 and wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit. In August 1944 Sartre wrote Anti-Semite and Jews. He was a contributor to the Combat, a newspaper developed by Albert Camus.
In 1945 Sartre moved to the rue Bonaparte where he wrote most of his works. He established a quarterly literary and political review Les Temps Modernes. He wrote The Roads to Freedom in 1945 until 1949. He wrote the play Dirty Hands in 1948 to explore the problem of being politically engaged. He believed in Marxism but did not join the Communist Party. He attacked abuses of freedom and human right by the Soviet Union in his writings. He exposed the existence of slave labor camps and opposed the invasion of Hungary. He was one of the signatories of the Manifest des 221 decrying the torture of Algerian citizens. He opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam Warm and organized a tribunal to expose U.S. war crimes.
He wrote Critique of Dialectical Reason in1960 and was a proponent of homosexuality. Sartre's health deteriorated due to the pace of wok and using drugs or amphetamines. He was completely blind by 1973 and died on April 15, 1980 from edema of the lungs.