well received, in spite or because of their pessimistic view of absurd human life. Albert Camus, later a close friend, was an early, enthusiastic reviewer.

Sartre was called into active service as a meteorologist on September 2, 1939, the day after German troops invaded Poland. His military duties were minimal, and he spent most of his time writing letters, a journal, and the first draft of a novel, L’Âge de raison (1945; The Age of Reason, 1947), first of the planned tetralogy, Les Chemins de la liberté (1945-1949; The Roads to Freedom, 1947-1950). Equally important was his philosophical work L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956), begun in the same period. In June, 1940, he was captured and sent to a German prison camp. Paradoxically, Sartre felt liberated as a prisoner. He enjoyed the solidarity of inmates against their jailers. He discussed theology and philosophy with the priests who served the camp and wrote his first play, Bariona: Ou, Le Fils de tonnere (1962; Bariona: Or, The Son of Thunder, 1970), a Christmas story published much later that camouflaged a call to resistance against foreign invasion. When he escaped in March, 1941, he returned to occupied Paris and resumed teaching.

Sartre and de Beauvoir were active in the Resistance as writers and distributors of underground material, but Sartre also continued writing philosophical and literary texts. Being and Nothingness was completed in October, 1942. The second novel of his tetralogy, Le Sursis (1945; The Reprieve, 1947), was finished in November, 1943. In 1943, Les Mouches (The Flies, 1946), a play based on the Greek myth of Orestes’ revenge on his mother Clytemnestra, appeared in Paris, using an ancient story to mask a call to violent resistance, and passed the German censors. During rehearsals, Sartre met Camus. They became friends, and Sartre wrote for Camus’s underground paper, Combat. In May of 1944, he presented a new play, Huis clos (1944; No Exit, 1946). The direct audience contact of the theater was congenial. As in his novels, Sartre used the conventions of plot and character to present his philosophical concepts to a wider public.

During the war, Sartre and de Beauvoir collected a family of former lovers, students, and friends who ate or starved together, with de Beauvoir coordinating the scanty rations. A social network of avant-garde artists and writers met for all-night parties in defiance of wartime curfews. Sartre, an accomplished jazz pianist, played and sang. A heavy drinker and smoker, he always preferred café atmosphere to academic circles. Shortages of food and goods meant little to him. He did not collect property. He idealized the solidarity of students, prisoners, and resistance fighters and, in the decades that followed, would yearn for and never quite recapture the euphoria of the war years. He remained on good terms with his mother and, after the death of his stepfather, shared an apartment with her from 1946 until 1961, when bomb threats made the arrangement dangerous for her. She died in January, 1969.

The end of the war coincided with Sartre’s entry into full-time writing and celebrity. Between 1945 and 1965, he wrote eleven plays and filmscripts, set in times and places as disparate as occupied France and medieval Germany. He promised a study on ethics to follow Being and Nothingness; it never came, but many considerations of good and evil were transposed into his biography of the outlaw genius Jean Genet, Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr (1952; Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1963). He published a major biographical essay entitled Baudelaire (English translation, 1950) in 1947, but his massive biography of Gustave Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857 (3 vols., 1971-1972; The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, partial translation, 1981), was never finished. His own autobiography, Les Mots (1964; The Words, 1964), covers only the early years of his childhood. He published La Mort dans l’âme (1949; Troubled Sleep, 1950), the third volume of his tetralogy, but the projected fourth book never appeared. Even his Critique de la raison dialectique, I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, 1976) was never finished, although some themes were transposed into other works. The sheer press of demands from all sides, coupled with the ferment of his ideas, made completion of these works unlikely, but their open-ended state gave an illusion of freedom; he still had the option of working on them. A series of essays, gathered in collections entitled Situations (1947-1976), dealt with specific issues, rather than philosophical generalizations. His emphasis was less on systematic consistency than on spontaneity of thought in relation to individual circumstances. His Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947; What Is Literature?, 1949) examines aesthetics, especially in literature, and makes the case for the “engaged writer,” who aims at action in the world and rejects “art for art’s sake.”

Sartre was the most prominent of a group loosely defined under the label “existentialist,” and his writings of the 1940’s and 1950’s most clearly define the terms of that movement in French literature, criticism, and philosophy. Sartre detested all labels. He argued that each man is responsible for himself, that the external definitions of history or religion conceal the chaos to which actions give shape, and that choice of those actions defines human liberty. To a France bowed down by the shame of defeat, existentialism offered a fresh start with a clean slate.

Immediately after the war, Sartre worked to found a new journal, Les Temps modernes (a bow to Charlie Chaplin), whose diverse editorial board encouraged freewheeling discussion of political and literary subjects. By the time of the French student uprisings of May, 1968, Sartre spoke a frank Maoist line and loaned his name to the editorial boards of radical underground journals, helping to distribute them in defiance of the law.

Sartre died of long-standing vascular illness on April 15, 1980. He had been virtually blind since 1973, able to work only with the help of patient friends such as de Beauvoir, who would talk with him and record his words. He had remained active, going to demonstrations and speaking at rallies, but gradually decaying flesh triumphed over will. He had been idolized and hated by a diverse, worldwide audience.

Summary

A listing of Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays, articles, biographies, philosophical studies, causes he espoused, travels, talks, demonstrations, and volatile friendships is dizzying. He declined a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, the first person ever to do so, because he said he preferred not to be made an institution. The example of writers of the Resistance who risked their lives in their work defined his artistic position. In a sense, Sartre always believed himself to be such a Resistance writer. As he worked for liberal causes around the world, he was never deterred by fears of ridicule. His flirtation with the French Communist Party and the governments of Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China was long-standing. A frequent apologist for Marxist movements, he still opposed oppression within the Eastern Bloc, speaking out against the Soviet use of force in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Sartre’s ideas influenced scholars, artists, and ordinary people. The novels and plays that brought his ideas directly before the public continue to be read and studied throughout the world. Situational ethics grew out of the existentialist milieu, as did the contemporary antihero, a figure whose anguish is measured by his individual reactions to life rather than eternal standards of good and evil. Although literary and critical fashion passed him by in the 1970’s, some fifty thousand people followed his funeral procession through the streets of Paris.

Bibliography

Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. A look at Sartre by his lifelong companion, de Beauvoir. If anyone can write a meaningful reflection on Sartre’s life it is de Beauvoir.

Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. Translated by Anna Cancogni. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. A lucid, flowing account of Sartre’s life, with particular attention given to the development of his interpersonal relationships. Contains illustrations, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Gerassi, John. Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. Vol 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. In a personal work, encouraged by Sartre, who knew the journalist author well, Gerassi presents the bourgeois writer on his way to revolutionary politics. The first volume covers the years before Sartre’s World War II Resistance work.

Hayman, Ronald. Sartre: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. An invaluable, scholarly work, this biography focuses with particular clarity on the progression of Sartre’s ideas and his changing philosophical stance. Contains illustrations, notes, a bibliography, an index, and a chronological table.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Words. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: George Braziller, 1964. This autobiographical work covers the childhood years of the author, giving a hypnotic, highly impressionistic picture of his relationship to his family and to the world of words and ideas. Few hard facts, no index or bibliography, but fascinating.