Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of German-Alsatian origin, and was a cousin of German Nobel prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever and Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.

As a teenager in the 1920s, Jean became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education, the alma mater for multiple prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger.

In 1929 at the Ecole Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted thinker, writer, and feminist. The two, it is documented, became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous.

He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy and served as a conscript in the French Army from 1929 to 1931.

Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually-destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943).

Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture. In this work, he defends existentialism against its detractors, which ultimately results in a somewhat incomplete description of his ideas. The work has been considered a popular, if over-simplifying, point of entry for those seeking to learn more about Sartre's ideas but lacking the background in philosophy necessary to fully absorb his longer work Being and Nothingness. One should not take the expression of his ideas contained here as authoritative; in 1965, Sartre told Francis Jeanson that its publication had been "an error."

L'imagination (Imagination: A Psychological Critique), 1936

La transcendance de l'égo (The Transcendence of the Ego), 1937

La nausée (Nausea), 1938

Le mur (The Wall), 1939

Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions), 1939

L'imaginaire (The Imaginary), 1940, lit. "The Unconscious"

Les mouches (The Flies), 1943 - a modern versio of the Oresteia

L'être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943

Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew; literally, Reflections on the Jewish Question), 1943

Huis-clos (No Exit), 1944

Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) trilogy, comprising:

L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason), 1945

Le sursis (The Reprieve), 1947

La mort dans l'Âme (Troubled Sleep, title formerly translated as Iron in the Soul, literally "Death in Spirit"), 1949

Morts sans sépulture (Deaths without burial; aka The Victors), 1946

L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946

La putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute) 1946

Qu'est ce que la littérature? (What is literature?), 1947

Baudelaire, 1947

Situations, 1947 –1965

Les mains sales (Dirty Hands), 1948

"Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus), introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. edited byLéopold Sédar Senghor, 1948

Le diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord), 1951

Les jeux sont faits (The Game is Up), 1952

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1952

Nekrassov, 1955

Existentialism and Human Emotions, 1957

The Problem of Method, 1957

Les séquestrés d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona), 1959

Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), 1960

"Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Search for a Method (English translation of preface to Critique, Vol. I) 1962

Les mots (The Words), 1964 - autobiographical

L'idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), 1971–1972 - on Gustave Flaubert

Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for Ethics), 1983, 1947-48 notes on ethics

Les carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939 - Mars 1940 (War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War 1939-1940), 1984, notebooks from Sartre's time in the Phony War of 1939-1940