The Imagination

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century and a renowned novelist, dramatist, and political activist. He passed the agrégation in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1929. His first novel, La Nausée, which Sartre considered one of his best works, was published in 1938. Sartre served as a meteorologist in the French army before being captured by German troops in 1940, spending nine months as a prisoner of war. He continued to write during his captivity, and, after his release, he published his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté and his classic of existential phenomenology, L'Être et le Néant. In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but declined it. During the events of 1968 he was arrested for civil disobedience but swiftly released by President Charles de Gaulle, who allegedly said 'one does not arrest Voltaire'. He died on 15 April 1980 in Paris, his funeral attracting an enormous crowd of up to 50,000 mourners. He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.