Jean-Paul Sartre was born June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. His father died when he was only one year old, after which he and his mother lived with his maternal grandparents. When he was eleven, his mother remarried, and they moved to La Rochelle. Sartre described his childhood and young adulthood in his Nobel Prize—winning autobiography Les Mots (1964; The Words). He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris, from which he graduated at the top of his class in 1929. It was there that he met Simone de Beauvoir, who graduated second in their class and was to become his lifelong companion as well as a major feminist and existentialist writer in her own right. The relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir, which has become legendary, lasted over half a century and was characterized by the intense intellectual sharing of two great minds made complicated...