Sartre was born in Paris. His father was a naval officer who died when Jean-Paul was young. Through his mother, the former Anne-Marie Schweitzer, he was a great nephew of Albert Schweitzer. Sartre attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He graduated from the Ècole Normale Supérieure in 1929. From 1931 to 1945 he worked as a teacher and travelled in Egypt, Greece, and Italy.

At the Left Bank cafés Sartre gathered around him a group of intellectuals in the 1930s. During WW II Sarte was drafted in 1939, imprisoned a year later in Germany, but released in 1941 (or he escaped). In Paris he joined resistance movement, writing for such magazines as Les Lettres Française and Combat. After the war he founded a monthly literary and political review, Les Temps modernes, and devoted full time to writing and political activity. He was never a member of Communist party, but when Camus openly criticized Stalinism Sartre still hesitated about such acts.

Sartre's first novel , LA NAUSÉE, appeared in 1938, and expressed under the influence of German philosopher Edmund Husserl's phenomenologicalmethod, that human life has no purpose. In his non-fiction works L'ÊTRE ET LE NÉANT (1943) Sartre formulated the basics of his philosophical system, developing ideas further in L'EXISTENTIALISME EST UN HUMANISME (1946), and CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON DIALECTIQUE (1960). According to Sartre, human being is terrifying free, and responsible for the choices he makes. Life has no meaning or purpose beyond the goals that each man sets for himself.

In 1956 Sartre spoke out on behalf of freedom for Hungarians and Czechs in 1968. In 1967 he headed the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell to judge American military conduct in Indochina. He became closely involved in movement against Vietnam War and supported student rebellion in 1968.

From 1960 until 1971 Sartre worked with a four-volume study called L'IDIOT DE LA FAMILLE, a wide biography of Gustave Flaubert, which used Freudian and Marxist interpretations, familiar from his philosophical works. Near the end of his life Sartre became blind. He died in Paris of oedema of the lungs on April 15, 1980.

Jean-Paul Sartre was largely responsible for our image of the postwar French intellectual - and as an activist and writer he was considered the leading interpteter of the postwar generation's world view. In his essays Sartre dealt with wide range of subjects, sometimes in provocative manner. 'The Republic of Silence' starts 'We were never more free than under the German occupation', expalining this later that then each gesture had the weight of a commitment. In 'The Humanism of Existentialism' he condensed the major theme of existentialist philosophy simply 'first of all, man exist, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself'.

For further reading: The Psychology of Sartre by P. Dempsey (1950); Sartre, Romantic Rationalis by I. Murdoch (1953); Sartre: The Origins of a Style by Fredric Jameson (1961); Sartre and the Artist by George H. Bauer (1969); Jean-Paul Sartre by Benjamin Suhl (1970); Existential Marxism in Postwar France by Mark Poster (1975); Critical Fictions by Joseph Halpern (1976); A Preface to Sartre by Dominic La Capra (1978); Writing Against by Ronald Hayman (1986, publ. in 1987 as Sartre: A Life)

Selected works:

• L'IMAGINATION, 1936 - Imagination: A Psychological Critique
• LA NAUSÉE, 1938 - Nausea
• LE MUR, 1938 - Muuri - film 1966, dir. by Serge Roullet
• ESQUISSE D'UNE THÉORIE DES ÉMOTIONS, 1939 - Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
• L'IMAGINAIRE: PSYCHOLOGIE PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUE DE L'IMAGINATION, 1940 - Psychology of Imagination
• L'ÉTRE ET LE NÉANT, 1943 - Being and Nothingness
• LES MOUCHES, 1943 - The Flies
• HUIS CLOS, 1945 - No Exit - film 1954, dir. by Jacqueline Audry
• L'ÁGE DE RAISON, 1945 - Age of Reason
• LE SURSIS, 1945 - The Reprieve
• L'EXISTENTIALISME EST UN HUMANISME, 1946 - Existentialism and Humanism
• LA PUTAIN RESPECTUEUSE, 1946 - film 1952, dir. by Charles Brabant & Marcello Pagliero
• BAUDELAIRE, 1947
• QU'EST-CE QUE LA LITTÉRATURE? - What is Literature?
• LES MAINS SALES, 1948 - Dirty Hands
• LA MORT DANS L'ÂME, 1949 - Iron in the Soul
• KEAN, 1951
• LE DIABLE ET LE BON DIEU, 1951 - Lucifer and the Lord
• SAINT GENET, COMÉDIEN ET MARTYR, 1952 - Saint Genet
, Actor and Martyr
• NEKRASSOV, 1956
• LES SÉQUESTRÉS D'ALTONA, 1959 - Loser Wins - Altonan vangit - film 1962, dir. by Vittorio De Sica
• CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON DIALECTIQUE, 1960 - Search for a Method
• Essays in Aesthetics, 1963
• LES MOTS, 1964 - The Words
• Essays in Existentialism, 1967
• L'IDIOT DE LA FAMILLE, 1971-72 ( 3 vol.) - The Family Idiot
• The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2: Selected Prose, 1974
• SITUATIONS I-X, 1947-76
• LETTRES AU CASTOR ET Á QUELQUES AUTRES I-II, 1983
• "What is Literature?" and 0ther Essays, 1988

Also filmed works: Les jeux sont faits, dir. by Jean Delannoy, 1947; Les orgueilleux, dir. by Yves Allégret, 1953