Sartre Born: Existentialist Who Declined the Nobel Prize

Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, the first person to voluntarily refuse the award. Born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, he studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and spent a formative year studying phenomenology in Berlin under Edmund Husserl's influence. His philosophical career began with "Nausea" in 1938, a novel that dramatized the existentialist experience of confronting the absurdity of existence. "Being and Nothingness," published in 1943 during the German occupation of France, established him as the leading philosopher of existentialism, arguing that human beings are "condemned to be free," meaning that freedom is not a gift but an inescapable condition that demands constant choice and responsibility. After the war, Sartre became one of the most politically engaged intellectuals in Europe. He co-founded the journal Les Temps Modernes, supported anti-colonial movements in Algeria and Vietnam, participated in the Russell Tribunal on American war crimes, and maintained a complicated relationship with Marxism that led him to support Communist causes while criticizing Soviet authoritarianism. His refusal of the Nobel Prize was characteristically principled and characteristically theatrical. He said he had always declined official honors and could not make an exception because the honor was larger. He argued that accepting the prize would compromise his independence by associating him with an institution. The Nobel committee awarded the prize anyway, and the money remained unclaimed. He spent his later years going blind, dictating work to assistants, and maintaining his partnership with Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist philosopher who was his intellectual equal and lifelong companion. He died on April 15, 1980. Fifty thousand people followed his coffin through the streets of Paris.