Existential America

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 r...