Painting by Henri Matisse

Jean-Paul Sartre was a great intellectual was a great intellectual who gave this world a new and volatile philosophy. Sartre rejected all the established norms and was a rebel in thoughts and actions. As time passed, his thoughts became all the more revolutionary. During the Second World War, he worked as a soldier for peace. Sartre had the courage of his convictions and severely criticized the US and Russia’s aggression in Vietnam, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, respectively.

This great thinker and writer was born in France in the year 1905. From his childhood, he showed ample signs of being an intellectual. The colossal destruction during the Second World War greatly affected him. In 1940-41, he was imprisoned in a Nazi camp. Later, Sartre joined a resistance group called Socialism et Liberte and also edited a magazine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964, which he labelled as a ‘sack of potatoes’ and rejected it.

Sartre lived in with his writer friend Simone de Beauvoire, the cleverest French womanof her time and remained unmarried. She was his companion through most of his life. Simone wrote several excellent books like The Second Sex, Lace Mandarins, The Women Destroyed, She Came to Stay, La Belle Images, Memories of a Beautiful Daughter, The Force of Circumstances and Prime and Life.

Amongst Sartre’s immortal books, the following may be mentioned, Words (autobiography), Being and Nothingness, Nausea, The Age of Reason, Iron in the Soul, The Flies, The Devil and the Good Lord, Reprieve, No Exit, The Respectable Prostitute, Critique, Situations, Saint Janet, Comedian et Martyr, Keen, Roads, to Freedom and Between Existentialism and Materialism. He discussed everything in them: Literature, Politics, religion, moral and philosophical problems. Kremlin and Vatican authorities banned many of his books.