Jean-Paul Sartre

(1905 - 1980)

An only child whose father died when he was fifteen months old, Jean-Paul Sartre met his lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir, while both were studying for the national secondary-school exam—he had failed it once before—and in 1929 he took first place and she second. In the late 1930s he published his first books, Nausea and The Wall, and was called into active service upon Germany’s invasion of Poland. Sartre completed his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, in 1942.