Sartre tried to turn down the Nobel Prize and got it anyway
In 1964 the Nobel committee awarded Jean-Paul Sartre its literature prize. He refused, explaining that a writer should never let himself become an institution, but he is still listed as that year's laureate. Decades earlier, as a student prankster, he had fooled Paris newspapers into announcing an honour for Charles Lindbergh that never existed.
Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father, a naval officer, died when he was two, probably of an illness caught in Indochina, and he grew up in his grandfather Charles Schweitzer's home in Meudon; Albert Schweitzer was a cousin. After his mother remarried, the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was bullied partly because of a wandering blind right eye. Reading Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will as a teenager pulled him towards philosophy.
At the École Normale Supérieure he befriended Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan and made mischief. In 1927 he and friends phoned newspapers claiming Lindbergh, fresh from his transatlantic flight, would receive an honorary degree; thousands turned up to watch a lookalike, and the scandal forced the director, Gustave Lanson, to resign. Years of weekly seminars with Alexandre Kojève shaped him more than anything else.
His central theme was the clash between bad faith, a self-deceiving conformity, and authentic existence, set out in Being and Nothingness in 1943 and popularised in the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism. He and Simone de Beauvoir kept an open relationship and rejected what they saw as bourgeois conventions in life and thought.
Drafted in the Second World War, he was captured, released, and co-founded a short-lived resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté, while writing plays such as No Exit under occupation. Afterwards he launched the journal Les Temps modernes, condemned French policy in Algeria, opposed American intervention in Vietnam, and at times aligned with Marxism and Maoism. He kept campaigning through failing health until 1980, and 50,000 people attended his funeral.
Source: Jean-Paul Sartre
