Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was an infant, so he was raised by his mother in his maternal grandfather’s home. As a child, he was small, sickly, and partially blind in one eye (which gave him his signature walleyed look). But he was precocious and developed an early love of literature. Sartre studied philosophy at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, a fellow philosophy student who would become his life-long companion and intellectual collaborator (their open partnership – they never married – became nearly as famous as their ideas).

Sartre’s early intellectual development was shaped by reading philosophers like Descartes, Kant, and notably the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and existentialist Martin Heidegger. In the 1930s, Sartre taught philosophy at a lycée. He also spent a year studying in Berlin, where he delved into phenomenology. These influences brewed in Sartre as he began formulating his own philosophy.

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