Sartre Born: Existentialist Who Declined the Nobel Prize
He turned down the Nobel Prize. In 1964, the Swedish Academy offered Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature and he declined, saying he'd always refused official honors and couldn't make an exception just because the honor was larger. He was the first person to voluntarily refuse the Nobel Prize. His reasoning was entirely consistent with his philosophy: existentialism held that no institution should define who you are. He died in 1980. Fifty thousand people followed his coffin through Paris.
June 21, 1905
121 years ago
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