Existentialism as Literature

In the wake of scientific and industrial advances in the nineteenth century and the unprecedented destruction of two world wars in the twentieth, existentialist literature emerges as both a crisis of meaning and an ambivalent sense of possibility. This chapter shows how existentialism’s approaches to human existence naturally align with creative forms of expression, particularly those of literary modernism. This chapter examines the literary works by existentialist philosophers including Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, while demonstrating how other modernist writers—including Rainer Maria Rilke, Kafka, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison—extend the reach of existentialist thought. Absurdity, mortality, freedom, alienation, and the pressure on human consciousness of oppression are among the many themes explored in existentialist literature.