Essayist, dramatist, prolific author, literary critic and existential philosopher, Jean-Paul did it all. A precocious child — he grew up reading heavy novels from his grandfather’s library before he could even understand them — he matured into a deeply insightful adult, whose early essay Being and Nothingness, arguing against determinism and religion for the possibility of complete self-control in humans, both influenced his early career and defined countless lives. Sartre lived an iconoclastic life, which would come up most prominently after his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On this day, October 22, in 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre declined to accept his Nobel Prize for literature, awarded in recognition of his work “rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth.” Sartre declined all awards as a matter of principle, saying an author should stay true to himself.

Sartre lived as he wrote: few possessions, no adornments, and merciless self-dedication. In a life with no inherent meaning, he wrote, each of us is to provide our own, and since Sartre was too big for one, his meaning became not only existentialism, but also Marxism (and attempts to connect the two), his published plays, and his treatises on a fellow French writer-philosopher Jean Genet. “As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered,” he said, he would like to be remembered for not what he did, but how he lived.