The Prize He Would Not Take

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In October 1964 the Swedish Academy announced that Jean-Paul Sartre had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sartre had already written to the Academy asking not to be considered, and when the prize was awarded anyway, he declined it, becoming the first laureate ever to refuse the honor of his own free will. His stated reasons were consistent with a lifetime's philosophy rather than a single grudge: a writer, he argued, should not let himself be transformed into an institution, and a writer's independence, his freedom to take unpopular political positions without the weight of an official title behind him, mattered more than the recognition itself. He also pointed out, pointedly, that the prize had historically gone to writers of the West far more often than to those of the East, and that accepting it in that context would have meant accepting an honor with its own quiet politics attached. The Academy kept the prize on its books regardless; Sartre kept his refusal, and the small allowance that came with the prize money went unclaimed as well, since French law would not let him give away money he had never formally accepted. He remained, by his own account, glad to have made the point and unbothered by the fact that almost nobody else who has ever won a Nobel Prize has made it.