David Cogswell. Illustrated by Joe Lee.
 
Existentialism For Beginners is an entertaining
romp through the history of a philosophical
movement that has had a broad and enduring
influence on Western culture. From the middle of
the Nineteenth Century through the late Twentieth
Century, existentialism informed our politics and
art, and still exerts its influence today. Tracing
the movement’s beginnings with close-up views
of seminal figures like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky
and Nietzsche, Existentialism For Beginners
follows its intellectual and literary trail to German
philosophers Jaspers and Heidegger, and finally
to the movement’s flowering in post-World War II
France thanks to masterworks by such giants as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus,
Simone de Beauvoir, plus many others.