Jean-Paul Sartre Biography

Jean-Paul Sartre is born in Paris to Jean-Baptiste Sartre and Anne-Marie Schweitzer.

Birth of Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre enters the Ecole Normale Superieure and joins an influential philosophical generation.

Sartre places first in the philosophy agregation and meets Simone de Beauvoir.

Publication of "Nausea"

Sartre publishes Nausea, a novel exploring contingency, freedom and existential unease.

Sartre is captured during the German invasion and spends months as a prisoner of war.

Sartre publishes Being and Nothingness, his major work of existential phenomenology.

Publication of "Roads to Freedom". Publication of "Being & Nothingness"

Sartre helps establish Les Temps Modernes as a journal of engaged literature and politics.

Publication of "Roads to Freedom". Publication of "Being & Nothingness"

Sartre publishes a lecture defending existentialism against prominent critics.

Publication of "Critique of Dialectical Reason"

Sartre declines the Nobel Prize in Literature to preserve his independence from institutions.

Jean-Paul Sartre dies in Paris, aged seventy-four.