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Overview
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is a French author, playwright, and political activist who was also one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century
. He was interested in the nature of existence, freedom, responsibility, consciousness, and time, helping to develop a philosophical movement called existentialism. Although Sartre is most well-known for his straightforward philosophical analysis in Being and Nothingness, he believed that philosophical arguments were most persuasive when presented as fiction, and plainly outlined many of his most complicated ideas in a thinly veiled narrative format.This SparkNotes guide offers concise discussions of five of Sartre’s works: the 1938 novel Nausea; Being and Nothingness (1944); a play, No Exit (1944); an essay, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (1946); and Sartre’s second best-known philosophical tract, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).
SparkNotes also offers a separate, more comprehensive study guides to Sartre’s philosophical plays Nausea and No Exit.
