February 14, 2003
America's Unlikely Existential Embrace
Americans have no sense of evil, tragedy, or alienation. So the French existentialists said in the 1940s, possibly on the basis of certain films involving singing cowboys.
In Existential America (Johns Hopkins University Press), George Cotkin, a professor of history at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, traces the unexpectedly warm welcome that Americans gave the works of Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir.
Intellectuals were influenced by their philosophical
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