On October 22, 1964, the Nobel Prize committee announced that Jean-Paul Sartre had won the highest award in international letters, the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.” But the French existentialist declined—becoming the first person ever to do so willingly (Boris Pasternak famously was rather forced to give up his 1958 Nobel by political pressure; Adolf Hitler prevented three Germans from accepting theirs).
Sartre had tried, before the prize was even announced, to convince the Academy not to pick him—he sent them a letter to that effect, emphasizing that he would not accept the prize if chosen, after reading in the French press that he was in contention, but by the time it arrived, the decision had already been made.
“I have always declined official honors,” Sartre explained in a statement to the Swedish Press after rejecting the prize. “This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable.”
He added that writers who accept awards necessarily associate themselves with the institutions who awarded them, and vice versa, another thing he did not find desirable. “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case.”
At the end of his statement, he touched on the prize money, which at the time was 250,000 Swedish krona. “[I]t is a very heavy burden that the Academy imposes upon the laureate by accompanying its homage with an enormous sum, and this problem has tortured me,” he wrote.