It’s the birthday of French intellectual, philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who in 1964 was offered the Nobel Prize in Literature but turned it down, like you do, because he didn’t want to be “transformed into an institution.” He also rejected the Legion of Honor for being too bourgeois, though I think he was mistaken about that one, because by some definitions I’m pretty bourgeois myself and the Legion of Honor has offered me squat.

Sartre was born in Paris, lost his father as a baby, and was a small, cross-eyed child with no friends; he learned to read before the age of four by pretending he could read, so that worked out. At 20, he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, a graduate school in France that the French get very excited about. There he met Simone de Beauvoir; they had a lifelong relationship but never married because marriage was too bourgeois. (I can confirm this. I am married myself, and not ironically.) After graduating, Sartre began teaching, though he took a year off to be a prisoner of war in 1940.

By then he had written several essays in philosophy and his first novel, the charmingly entitled Nausea (1938), about a character who becomes revulsed by the world of matter, including his own body. (Beach read!) In 1943, Sartre published his book Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, all about the existential choice buried in our consciousness, which itself exists in opposition to thingness, so put that on your list of phenomenological ontology books to get to this summer. He also wrote many plays, including Dirty Hands (1948), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), and The Condemned of Altona (1959).

Politically, Sartre was on the left. Very far left. No, farther than that—scootch on over. As a teacher, he protested his own higher social class by refusing to wear a tie, and for a time, he was drawn to Soviet-style communism, but, that tanked (ha ha ha) when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956. In spite of devoting his life and writings to matters of deep profundity, Sartre was a good humored man, viewing life as a board game, though probably not Monopoly, which would surely be too bourgeois.

Sartre remained politically active throughout his life and lived in a manner true to his beliefs, with few possessions. He died in Paris at 74 from edema of the lung and had a funeral attended by 50,000 Parisians.

Have a fantastic Friday filled with your favorite bourgeois activities, or not, and stay scrupulously honest to the data, which, truly, Sartre himself tried to do.