Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre's father died before he was two; he grew up in his grandfather's house steeped in books, and met Simone de Beauvoir as a fellow student at the École Normale Supérieure in 1929, beginning a lifelong intellectual and romantic partnership the two deliberately never formalized into marriage. Captured as a soldier in 1940, he spent nine months as a prisoner of war before returning to occupied Paris.

Nausea (1938) had already staged his philosophy before he fully theorized it in Being and Nothingness (1943). Postwar, he ran the journal Les Temps Modernes and became the era's most visible public intellectual, weighing in on colonialism, Marxism, and the 1968 student uprisings. He turned down the 1964 Nobel Prize, arguing a writer shouldn't let himself be institutionalized, and died in 1980 to a funeral procession that stopped Paris traffic for hours.