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President Theodore Roosevelt begins his first full term. -
Jean Paul Sartre was born on June 21st, 1905 in Paris, France. -
Sartre lost his father at an early age and grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, uncle of the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer and himself professor of German at the Sorbonne.
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He was not really blessed with height (by the way he was 5 feet)- 5FT. 3 INCH.) . He was also cross eyed which was mentioned in one of his books on how he would switch from park to park to find playmates. -
Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated as the 28th president (March 4) -
He was around twelve when he would spend most of his life in Paris going to cafes on the left bank. Also as a child, Sartre was small and cross-eyed — features which followed him through life — and he was generally unsuited for the activities of more ordinary children
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After attending the Lycée Henri IV for a while in Paris, he transferred to the Lycée in La Rochelle after his mother remarried. He graduated shortly after.
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Upon graduation, he entered the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris and graduated first in his class — an extraordinary feat because of the demanding requirements of the school. -
While at the École, he formed a friendship with the young Simone de Beauvoir, who continually placed second behind him on all the exams.
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The Star-Spangled Banner is adopted as the national anthem (March 3)
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he taught high school in Le Havre, Lyon, and Paris. It was a period during which he began to feel the need for focusing his ideas in a way that would make them accessible to large groups of people.
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A one-year sabbatical in 1934 at the French Institute in Berlin enabled him to immerse himself in modern German philosophy, particularly the works of Heidegger and Husserl. Heidegger's thinking was attractive to Sartre as he emerged from his Catholic background into a godless universe -
Upon his return to France, he spent the years from 1934 to 1945 teaching at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris.
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His first major breakthrough as a writer came in 1938 with his novel Nausea, which some critics feel is his best work. -
Sartre was drafted in 1939 for the French Army. -
World War II or the Second World War was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers.
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Sartre was taken prisoner-of-war in 1940 with the fall of France.
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In 1943, Sartre presented his first play, The Flies, as well as his monumental philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness, both of which established him as one of France's most profound and gifted writers -
A year later, he wrote No Exit, another attempt to reveal his ideas about freedom and the human condition. -
The theater was a good way of doing this, but he also felt that the novel might also prove to be useful. So in 1945, he published the first two volumes of a proposed four-volume series entitled The Roads to Freedom -
In 1946, Sartre gave up teaching and devoted himself entirely to his writing; his busy schedule would no longer permit the drudgery of traditional employment.
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The years between volumes two and three were feverish ones for Sartre; he wrote plays (The Respectable Prostitute, 1946; The Chips are Down, 1947; and Dirty Hands, 1948), literary criticism, and a significant philosophical essay delivered originally as a lecture to the "Club Maintenant" (Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946).
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Congress passes foreign aid bill including the Marshall Plan, which provides for European postwar recovery (April 2) -
The Age of Reason and The Reprieve, were the only ones which he completed until 1949, when he finished Iron in the Soul. At that time, he decided that the novel was not as effective a genre as the theater, so he abandoned plans to write a fourth installment -
In 1960, he wrote the extremely dense and complicated Critique of Dialectical Reason, a political treatise which contains the essay "Search for a Method." This essay rivals, and even surpasses, the complexity of Being and Nothingness. -
In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for his literary achievements. But Sartre refused the Nobel Prize, eschewing it as a cultural symbol with which he did not wish to be associated. -
The last years of Sartre's life were consumed with his work on Flaubert, the nineteenth-century French novelist -