At age 38, Jean-Paul Sartre published *Being and Nothingness* (1943) and rewired how the Western world thinks about freedom and responsibility. Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905, and grew into a philosopher, novelist, playwright, and political activist whose fingerprints cover virtually every serious intellectual movement of the 20th century. His existentialist argument, that existence precedes essence, meaning humans author themselves through choice, put radical personal accountability at the center of modern ethics. He extended that argument into the Cold War arena, writing and agitating on colonialism, Marxism, and civil rights. In 1964 he famously refused the Nobel Prize in Literature to preserve his independence. His plays, essays, and novels still anchor university syllabi worldwide, and his insistence that there are no excuses continues to unsettle readers every generation.