Books Written by Jean-Paul Sartre

This page lists 22: the 13 key books, plus 9 more in the bibliography, among them the last two volumes of Roads to Freedom, four more plays and his unfinished study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot. He also published several volumes of essays under the title Situations, and more work, including the second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, appeared after his death.

His key books in order of French publication: Nausea (1938), The Wall (1939), The Flies (1943), Being and Nothingness (1943), No Exit (1944), The Age of Reason (1945), Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), What Is Literature? (1947), Dirty Hands (1948), Saint Genet (1952), Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and The Words (1964).

Nausea (1938), his first novel, which puts his central ideas into the diary of one man. If you want the ideas stated directly, read the short lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism; if you prefer theatre, No Exit. Leave Being and Nothingness until you know the ideas, as it is long and technical.

As philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943), his main work on freedom, consciousness and bad faith. As literature, Nausea (1938) and the play No Exit (1944), the source of “Hell is other people”.

The Swedish Academy awarded him the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age”, and he declined it. He had written to the Nobel Institute on 14 October 1964 asking to be removed from the nominees, but the letter went unread. In his public statement he said that “a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution”, and that he did not want to take sides in the cultural struggle between East and West. He had always declined official honours, including the Légion d’honneur in 1945.

The line, “L’enfer, c’est les autres” in French, is spoken by Garcin near the end of No Exit. The three dead characters have no torturer; each is trapped under the gaze and judgement of the others, unable to escape how they are seen. It dramatises what Being and Nothingness calls “the look”, rather than claiming that other people are simply unbearable.

The Age of Reason (1945), The Reprieve (1945) and Troubled Sleep (1949), also published in English as Iron in the Soul. The trilogy follows Mathieu Delarue and his circle from the summer of 1938 through the Munich crisis to the defeat of France in 1940.

No. They met in 1929, when both sat the agrégation in philosophy, which he passed first and she second, and remained lifelong companions without marrying and without being monogamous. They founded Les Temps modernes together, and she is buried beside him in Montparnasse Cemetery.

Mostly for his politics. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1954 he said he had found complete freedom of criticism there; he supported the French Communist Party until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, later backed French Maoists, and in 1974 visited Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction in Stammheim prison during a hunger strike, criticising the conditions of his imprisonment. He supported Algerian independence, and in 1961 a bomb exploded at his apartment building. In 1977 he and Beauvoir signed petitions on France’s age-of-consent laws, and Bianca Lamblin and other young women in their circle later made allegations of sexual exploitation against them both.

No Exit most often: by Jacqueline Audry as Huis clos (1954), by Tad Danielewski as No Exit (1962), and twice for BBC television, as In Camera (1964) and Vicious Circle (1985).

A French philosopher, novelist, playwright and political activist, born in Paris on 21 June 1905. He was a key figure in existentialism and phenomenology, and his best-known works include the novel Nausea, the treatise Being and Nothingness and the play No Exit.

A family of philosophical views that explore the individual's struggle to live an authentic life in a world that seems absurd. Existentialists stress personal freedom, responsibility and choice; Sartre summed up the core idea as "existence precedes essence", meaning people are not born with a fixed nature but define themselves through what they do.

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is generally regarded as the first existentialist, although the label was applied to him only after his death. The word itself was coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s, and Sartre publicly adopted it in his lecture of 29 October 1945, published as Existentialism Is a Humanism.

Jean-Paul Sartre. The line, "L'enfer, c'est les autres" in French, is spoken in his play No Exit (Huis clos) from 1944.

Three people are shown into a room that turns out to be hell, and the door is locked behind them. They expect to be tortured, but no torturer comes: they realise they are there to torment one another by probing each other's sins, desires and painful memories.

Yes. His philosophy rests on the position that there is no creator, and in his 1945 lecture he described existentialism as "the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism."

Yes, he embraced Marxism, although by most accounts he never joined the French Communist Party. He supported the party in the 1950s until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, after which he criticised its authoritarian tendencies, and from the late 1960s he supported French Maoist groups.

He died of pulmonary oedema in Paris on 15 April 1980, aged 74. About 50,000 people attended his funeral on 19 April.

In the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. He was first placed in a temporary grave, then cremated at Père Lachaise, and his ashes were reburied in the permanent grave at Montparnasse.