Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize in 1964. He died in 1980. Sartre also refused to accept the Legion of Honor.
Sartre passed his second aggregation exam in philosophy in 1929. His was the top score out of 76 exam takers. She who scored the second highest? Simone de Beauvoir, at 21, three years younger than Sartre.
"If Sartre already showed great intelligence and a solid, if at times inexact, culture, everybody agreed that, of the two, she was the real philosopher."
Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, Anna Cancogni, translator (Pantheon / Random House 1987)
