Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic who lived from 1905 to 1980. He was a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and one of the key figures in existentialism and phenomenology.
Jean-Paul Sartre refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature because he said he always declined official honors and that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. He did not wish to take sides in an East versus West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution. He was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize.
Jean-Paul Sartre's central idea was that people are condemned to be free. He held that there is no creator and therefore no fixed human nature, summed up as existence precedes essence. Because people cannot explain their actions by reference to a human nature, they are fully responsible for those actions.
Jean-Paul Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir at the École normale in 1929 and the two became lifelong companions in an open, non-monogamous relationship. Together they challenged the cultural and social assumptions of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his essay Paris under the Occupation that the correct behavior of the German soldiers entrapped Parisians into complicity, making the unnatural feel natural. He described Paris as a sham peopled by the absent, with food shortages so severe that he lived on rotting, maggot-filled rabbits sent from Anjou.
Jean-Paul Sartre died on the 15th of April 1980 in Paris from pulmonary edema. At his funeral on the 19th of April, 50,000 Parisians descended onto the boulevard du Montparnasse to accompany his cortege, and his ashes were ultimately reburied at Montparnasse Cemetery.