Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most important representatives of French Existential Philosophy. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, his complete name, was born in Paris on 21 June 1905. After he finished school he began to study philosophy, psychology, philology and sociology in Paris. In the 1930s Jean-Paul Sartre taught at a grammar school in Le Havre, later he taught in several places, for instance in Neuilly, and went to Berlin on an academic scholarship. In the years around 1940 he served in the military and was a prisoner of war.
After Jean-Paul Sartre was released from captivity, he published some of his most important writings. Among them the work that became one of the standards of Existentialism "Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology" (1943), as well as the play "The Flies", which premiered in 1943, the same year it was released. Other renowned works followed, among them "No Exit" (1945) or "The Devil and the Good Lord" (1951).
In 1960 Sartre wrote the book "Critique of Dialectical Reason", which is decisive for the comprehension of Sartre's philosophy. In the book he works up elements from Marxist teachings. In 1965 Jean-Paul Sartre was to be honored with the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking literary achievements - however, for "personal and objective" reasons he refused the decoration.
After his death in 1980 Jean-Paul Sartre found his last resting-place in a simple tomb on the Parisian cemetery Montparnasse, where the writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Sartre's partner and companion in life, is also buried.