Pessimism is back. That will not surprise anyone who has been keeping track of the nation’s pulse over the past several months — or perhaps the last several years. Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, ...

There is much talk in Paris, in Greenwich Village, even in the center of Manhattan, about existence and existentialism. The existentialists assemble in the Cafe de Flore in Paris. There is a series of ...

Existentialism, which was all the rage in Europe and America in the late ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, has lost much discernible meaning. One rarely even hears the term these days. In our age of terror, ...

Existentialism was not a unified school of thought or movement. Rather, it was an attitude or mood expressing the cultural ferment of the age through philosophy and literature, borne out of postwar ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The image of the existentialist as a cafe-dwelling, chain-smoking, beret-wearing intellectual type comes largely from Sartre ...

The literary lion of Paris bounced into Manhattan last week for a brief lecture tour (stops at Yale, Harvard, Princeton). He put up at a genteel midtown hotel—partly because he could find no other ...

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles (The Collector 1963; The Magus 1965) is hinged on a selection of intertexts ranging from Darwinian Naturalism (or “post-modern Evolutionary Theory”) ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue ...