Born in Paris in 1905 to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer in the French navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, Jean-Paul lost his father at the tender age of fifteen months. He attended the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris, one of the country's most prestigious schools, and graduated in 1929.
While at ENS, Sartre met the woman who was to become his lifelong companion: Simone de Beauvoir. He and Simone had a mutual arrangement and a partnership that remained in place for years. However, they never married, for Sartre did not believe in such a "bourgeois" institution. Also at ENS, Sartre met Emmanuel Mounier, Raymond Aron, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean Hippolyte, and Simone Weil, all of whom...
