In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote to the Nobel committee asking them not to give him the prize in literature, and when they did anyway he publicly refused it, saying a writer should not allow himself to be transformed into an institution. This episode follows the life behind that paradox: a boy in Paris who lost his naval-officer father at two, was raised by a strict grandfather, and was bullied for a wandering eye; a student prankster whose fake Lindbergh visit forced a school director to resign; a drafted meteorologist who spent nine months in a German prisoner-of-war camp reading philosophy; and a writer surviving occupied Paris on maggot-ridden rabbit packages.

The hosts explain how the impeccably polite German occupiers trapped Parisians into complicity, and how that suffocating experience produced the ideas that existence precedes essen ...