ABSTRACT
Born 21 June 1905, in Thiviers (Dordogne), Jean-Paul Sartre was raised in the Parisian home of his widowed mother’s parents. After his mother’s remarriage, he spent several years with her and his stepfather in La Rochelle but returned to the capital to continue his education, first at the prestigious lycées Henri IV and Louis-le-Grand, and then at the renowned Ecole Normale Supérieure. After several years of teaching in various lycées, interspersed with a year of research at the French Institute in Berlin (1933-4), mobilization during the Phoney War (1939-40), and internment in a prisoner of war camp (1940-1), Sartre abandoned teaching for a career as an author and critic. He founded the review Les Temps modernes with Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and others (1944), refused the Legion of Honour (1945) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1962), and became increasingly involved in the politics of the left in the second half of his life. Sartre adopted a former student, Arlette Elkaïm (1965), who had become his literary heir. He died in Paris on 15 April 1980.
