Sartre, Jean-Paul 
1905 - 1980. 
French author and philosopher. 

A leading proponent of existentialism. He published his first novel, La Nausee/Nausea, 1937, followed by the trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberte/Roads to Freedom 1944-45 and many plays, including Huis Clos/In Camera 1944. L'Etre et le neant/Being and Nothingness 1943, his first major philosophical work, sets out a radical doctrine of human freedom. In the later work Critique de la raison dialectique/Critique of Dialectical Reason 1960 he tried to produce a fusion of existentialism and Marxism. Sartre was born in Paris, and was the long-time companion of the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir. During World War II he was a prisoner for nine months, and on his return from Germany joined the Resistance. As a founder of existentialism, he edited its journal Les Temps modernes/Modern Times, and expressed its tenets in his novels and plays. According to Sartre, people's awareness of their own freedom takes the form of anxiety, and they therefore attempt to flee from this awareness into what he terms mauvaise foi ("bad faith"); this is the theory he put forward in L'Etre et le neant/Being and Nothingness. In Crime passionel/Crime of Passion 1948 he attacked aspects of communism while remaining generally sympathetic. In his later work Sartre became more sensitive to the social constraints on people's actions. He refused the Nobel Prize for Literature 1964 for "personal reasons", but allegedly changed his mind later, saying he wanted it for the money.