Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.


 * Simone de Beauvoir reports in "The Prime of Life", pp. 169-170, that Jean-Paul Sartre had a medically supervised mescaline injection in 1935 along with an intern. Sartre reported seeing lobsters, orangutans, and houses gnashing their jaws - and the intern reported virtually romping through a meadow full of nymph. http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf20/michaux.html


 * Thomas Riedlinger speculates that Sartres nightmarish mescaline visions, which clung to him for months after, became the inspiration for his acclaimed novel Nausea that he wrote in 1938 and which helped him win the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature (which he refused). - Gnosis magazine no. 26. 1993 & Grob, Charles S. (Editor)(2002). Hallucinogens: A Reader. Two Classic Trips: Jean-Paul Sartre and Adelle Davis by Thomas Riedlinger.