Being and Nothingness / Nausea

Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, which he famously declined, making him one of the most iconoclastic figures in modern intellectual history. His philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness established the foundations of existentialism with its central thesis that existence precedes essence, while his novel Nausea rendered those ideas in vivid fictional form. Together, these works made Sartre the defining voice of a philosophical movement that would dominate post-war European thought.

Emerging in the years before the Second World War and extending through the Cold War era, Sartre's existentialism became the dominant intellectual current of post-war France and beyond. His ideas profoundly influenced contemporaries and successors including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, shaping debates about freedom, responsibility, and political engagement for decades to come.