Existentialism

Literary existentialism holds to a simple situation: a person without excuse, facing a choice, in a world that supplies no justification. Sartre demonstrates it through the nausea of a man before a chestnut root, Camus through a closed city where plague forces each to decide whether to treat or to flee, Beauvoir through the disarray of intellectuals after 1945. The movement was born in the Paris of the Occupation and the Liberation, but it acknowledges its ancestors in Dostoevsky and Unamuno, and it always turns on the same question: what to do when nothing is written.

works 6

• NovelCrime and PunishmentПреступление и наказаниеFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866A novel of 1866: a poor student in Saint Petersburg kills a pawnbroker to test a theory, and has to live with his act.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelFogNieblaMiguel de Unamuno · 1914Augusto Pérez, in love and at a loss, goes to ask advice from the writer who invented him.Literature
• NovelMan's FateLa Condition humaineAndré Malraux · 1933A workers' insurrection takes a Chinese city, then receives from its own allies the order to lay down its arms.Literature
• NovelNauseaLa NauséeJean-Paul Sartre · 1938The diary of a man for whom the most ordinary objects suddenly become unbearable, without his being able to say why.Literature
• NovelThe PlagueLa PesteAlbert Camus · 1947A North African city is closed off because of an epidemic, and those shut inside must decide what to do with the months ahead.Literature
• NovelThe MandarinsLes MandarinsSimone de Beauvoir · 1954A group of left-wing intellectuals discovers, in the aftermath of the Liberation, that they will have to choose between what they believe and what they know.Literature