During World War II, Sartre joined the French Army but spent most of his time working on a novel and two plays. Captured by the Germans, he was a prisoner of war for eight months, during which time he produced plays. He escaped using papers that the German officers had themselves forged for him. He returned to the French resistance, and promptly resumed his writing, finishing two plays, The Flies and No Exit. The latter contains the famous line 'Hell is other people.' When Sartre's massive philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, appeared in 1943, it was instantly heralded as a new philosophical classic. By the war's end, he became the famous proponent of his atheistic brand of existentialism and a world-renowned leader of left-wing intellectuals.
From 1946, Sartre developed his own understanding of Marxism, which culminated in his work The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He was politically very active, especially during this period. In 1964, he won the Nobel Prize, but refused to accept it on grounds that Alfred Nobel, who had made his fortune by inventing and selling dynamite, had profited from human suffering and that the prize was merely another political tool of the military-industrial complex. Toward the end of his life, Sartre wrote a three-volume work on the novelist Gustave Flaubert, entitled The Family Idiot, in which he studies how the author of Madame Bovary came to write and define himself as he did.
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