He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.

[9] When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right eye (sensory exotropia).

[28] The neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

[30][31] He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux,[32] and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war—in Nancy and finally in Stalag XII-D [fr], Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas.

It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology.

In spring of 1941, Sartre suggested with "cheerful ferocity" at a meeting that the Socialisme et Liberté assassinate prominent war collaborators like Marcel Déat, but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected as "none of us felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades".

[39] Sartre wrote about the "languid existence" of the Parisians as people waited obsessively for the one weekly arrival of trucks bringing food from the countryside that the Germans allowed, writing: "Paris would grow peaked and yawn with hunger under the empty sky.

[41] Sartre and his friends at the Café de Flore had reasons for their fear; by September 1940, the Abwehr alone had already recruited 32,000 French people to work as mouches while by 1942 the Paris Kommandantur was receiving an average of 1,500 letters per day sent by the corbeaux.

[47] Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs.

In the essay, in the course of explaining the etiology of "hate" as the hater's projective fantasies when reflecting on the Jewish question, he attacks antisemitism in France[48] during a time when the Jews who came back from concentration camps were quickly abandoned.

Then, in 1948, for the introduction of Léopold Sédar Senghor's l'Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry), he wrote "Black Orpheus" (re-published in Situations III), a critique of colonialism and racism in light of the philosophy Sartre developed in Being and Nothingness.

The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period—when the world was perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs—of highly publicized political involvement.

[51] Sartre was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the German occupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach from being executed.

But this cultural polity has prospects only as elements of a policy which defends Europe's cultural autonomy vis-à-vis America and the Soviet Union, but also its political and economic autonomy, with the aim of making Europe a single force between the blocs, not a third bloc, but an autonomous force which will refuse to allow itself to be torn into shreds between American optimism and Russian scientificism.

[51] Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc, arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive"[56] and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union[57] to the extent that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik".

"il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt"), became a catchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell the whole truth to the workers in order to avoid decline in their revolutionary enthusiasm.

In the Critique Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious.

[77] During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction member Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment.

The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation).

[85] Though his name was then a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the May 1968 strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience.

[87]Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work (and the use of amphetamine)[88] he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remained unfinished.

[91][92] The funeral started at "the hospital at 2:00 p.m., then filed through the fourteenth arrondissement, past all Sartre's haunts, and entered the cemetery through the gate on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet".

[105][106] While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved around the notion of human freedom, he began a sustained intellectual participation in more public matters towards the end of the Second World War, around 1944–1945.

[107] Before World War II, he was content with the role of an apolitical liberal intellectual: "Now teaching at a lycée in Laon ... Sartre made his headquarters the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards.

He continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it through literature".

[115] Therefore, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: "the international world order, the political and economic organisation of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminate information.

[119][120] In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged Sartre in political matters, he set forth a body of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme of his early thought and began to explore alternative solutions to the problems posed there".

[121] The greatest difficulties that he and all public intellectuals of the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of the world that were outdating the printed word as a form of expression.

He was skilled enough, however, to circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media, advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice versa.

[123] Sartre's role as a public intellectual occasionally put him in physical danger, such as in June 1961, when a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building.