Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, the leading figure of existentialism, author of Nausea, Being and Nothingness, and No Exit.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the most prominent existentialist thinker of the twentieth century, developing a philosophy centered on radical freedom, responsibility, and the idea that “existence precedes essence.”
His philosophical masterwork Being and Nothingness sat alongside influential fiction and drama — the novel Nausea, the play No Exit (source of the line “Hell is other people”), and the Roads to Freedom trilogy — that dramatized his ideas. A committed public intellectual and political activist, he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964.
Sartre is recognized as a defining figure of modern philosophy and engaged intellectual life, whose ideas about freedom and authenticity remain widely influential.