Europe's leading existential thinkers -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone
de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus -- all felt that Americans were too
self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of
responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in
America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre
remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no
"feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American
materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid,
widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less than
their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in
the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America,
historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to
life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face
of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the
United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been
fully realized or appreciated.
As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to
existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of
thinkers -- from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily
Dickinson and William James -- who had wrestled with the problems
of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre
and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American
existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism
first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of
Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for
the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the
evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard
Wright andRalph Ellison to help articulate the African-American
experience; its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and
photographer Robert Frank; its incorporation into the tenets of the
feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s; and its
lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular
culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors,
Fight Club and American Beauty.
The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this
highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to
the history of American culture since the end of the Second World
War.
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