Europes leading existential thinkers JeanPaul Sartre Simone de Beauvoirand Albert Camus all felt that Americans were too selfconfident and shallowto accept th... » 

Europes leading existential thinkers JeanPaul Sartre Simone de Beauvoirand Albert Camus all felt that Americans were too selfconfident and shallowto accept their philosophy of responsibility choice and the absurd. There isno pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization Sartreremarked in 1950 while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no feeling for sinand for remorse and Camus derided American materialism and optimism.Existentialism however enjoyed rapid widespread and enduring popularityamong Americans. No less than their European counterparts Americanintellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. InExistential America historian George Cotkin argues that the existentialapproach to life marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the faceof uncertainty has deep American roots and helps to define the United Statesin the twentiethcentury in ways that have never been fully realized orappreciated.As Cotkin shows not only did Americans readily take to existentialism butthey were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers from JonathanEdwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James who hadwrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world longbefore Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an Americanexistential tradition Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrivedin America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogueamong New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre Beauvoir and Camus.Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America its adoption byRichard Wright andRalph Ellison to help articulate the AfricanAmericanexperience its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographerRobert Frank its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radicalstudent movements of the 1960s and its lingering presence in contemporary «