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The titles of novels and plays like Nausea, The Stranger, Journey to the End of Night, and No Exit contributed to the notion of existentialism as pessimistic, fatalistic, and nihilistic.
These perceptions contributed to the chilly reception French existentialism received from the American academic philosophical community. American intellectuals were skeptical about whether existentialism was a philosophy at all. It was criticized as excessively morbid with its themes of alienation, anxiety, and the absurd, and it was dismissed as the psychological expression of the French war experience. Furthermore, its leading representatives seemed like literary artists and popular celebrities more than serious philosophers. Existentialism was considered one of those French fads, and it was felt that the American public’s curiosity would no doubt fade with the emergence of the next fad.
The prevailing view is that existentialism had no significant presence in the United States before the 1940s.2 After all, it was only introduced by the French after the war, and the fad was evaluated and then dismissed by the popular press and ignored by the intellectual community. Moreover, existentialism’s pessimistic outlook was considered contrary to the American optimistic mood. France came out of World War II a shattered and defeated nation, its soil occupied and riches plundered by the Nazi enemy. The United States emerged from the war victorious and poised to begin a period of national prosperity and world ascendancy. Americans had every reason to feel confident about the direction of the nation and optimistic about their personal future. It was understandable that the French would embrace a philosophy that expressed their experience, but Americans had little reason for despair.
In this book, I argue that conventional wisdom about existentialism in the United States is mistaken. Its presence in this country was overlooked because existentialism was treated as a European phenomenon that had to be introduced to the United States, and then it was largely rejected because its values were considered contrary to the American ethos. I will demonstrate that the United States developed its own unique brand of existentialism at least several years before Sartre and Camus published their first existentialist works and more than a decade before their famous visit to New York.