Existential America

By George Cotkin

Book Overview

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 and Ralph 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801870372
• ISBN13: 9780801870378
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.6" x 9.7"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An engrossing and highly entertaining read

George Cotkin has written a fascinating history of the existential themes and concerns that have run throughout the course of American intellectual history. Drawing from sources ranging not only from philosophy and religion but from literature, art, photography, theater and, surprisingly, even politics and popular social criticism, Cotkin reveals that, far from being merely a European concern, existentialism was already deeply embedded within the American psyche by the time Sartre visited the U.S. in the 1940s. Indeed, existential concerns informed the works of American pragmatist philosopher William James, as well as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who are also both featured in Louis Menand's excellent work The Metaphysical Club) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cotkin himself locates the beginnings of our own existentialist tradition in the Calvinist tradition and the psychic ravages experienced by the nation as a result of its experiences with the Civil War, slavery, and the mass annihilation of Native Americans, and daily grind associated with life in the 1800s. Despite our reputation for liberal optimism, nineteenth century American culture was deeply steeped in moral contradiction and death and the resulting anguish is evidenced in the works by many early American writers such as Herman Melville, the so-called American Dostoyevsky. Hence, when Kierkegaard was finally translated into English in the 1940s, the American academic audience was receptive and the impact was immediate, particularly in religious and social criticism circles. Interestingly enough, Sartre and Beauvoir had only limited influence in the 1940s and `50s in large part due to their leftwing politics, which alienated the staunchly anti-communist New York intellectuals. In a systematic yet exciting fashion, Cotkin traces the chronology of European existentialist influence upon American thinkers, beginning with Kierkegaard on through Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and Heidegger on American thinkers, artists, and activists. The breadth of Cotkin's analysis is amazing. Novelists Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and writer Norman Mailer are featured at length, with briefer treatments of works by Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Dorothy Sayers, and William March (The Bad Seed), and hardboiled detection fiction writers such as James M. Cain (whose work inspired Camus' The Stranger), and Dashiell Hammett. In addition, novelist and dramatist Thornton Wilder are given broader treatment, while the works of playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, and poets W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson are briefly discussed or mentioned in passing, as is Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra. Especially delightful are Cotkin's discussions of painters Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, photographer Robert Frank (whose works appeared in the famous Family of Man exhibition), and art critic Harold Rosenberg's analyses of the American Action Painters, includi

Great Book, Important Subject

Cotkin has done a wonderful job of taking a very complex subject (one which seems to attract bad writers as well) and turning it into a good story. Best of all: He writes in jargon-free English. Perfect for a Senior seminar in American intellectual history. How was existentialism received in America? Read the book.