John Paul Sartre
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Chapter 5: Friends and Enemies John Paul Sartre |
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Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Sartre was born into a middle-class family in Paris , In reaction to this, Sartre rebelled against his bourgeois upbringing and turned to Marxism as the basis of his political philosophy. First a teacher, he studied the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger; rejecting traditional Christianity and philosophy, he became a founder of the philosophy of Existentialism. As an Existentialist, he believed that one has to take responsibility for oneself by becoming engaged in defining one's own life. Written in response to friends who fought in the Spanish Civil War, "The Wall" portrays the absurdity of life, especially during a war. As a French soldier during World War II, he was taken prisoner for nine months and later joined the French Resistance. After the war, he became a Communist, and though he rejected Soviet communism after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, he always remained loyal to leftist causes. His long-time companion was the author Simone de Beauvoir. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but refused it. His major philosophical works include Being and Nothingness (1943) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). His most famous fiction includes the novels Nausea (1938) and The Roads to Liberty (a trilogy). His dramas include The Flies (1943), No Exit (1945), and The Condemned of Altona (1961). He wrote biographies and an autobiography. His criticism of literature is best explained in What Is Literature? (1948). Author Links
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"The Wall"
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