‘Existentialism’ refers in the first instance to a mode of philosophical enquiry associated primarily with Martin Heidegger in Germany and Jean-Paul Sartre in France. While critics have pointed to anticipations of existentialist thought in philosophers going as far back as the ancient Greeks, the ‘fathers’ of existentialism are generally held to be Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Other twentieth-century thinkers associated with the term are Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Existentialism was also a broader cultural phenemenon deriving its force from the notoriety attaching to the literary output, the political stances, and the lifestyle of its two foremost French practitioners, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. One would hesitate before referring to existentialism as a ‘literary movement’: if nouveau roman and nouveau théâtre were labels which, albeit problematically, designated a set of properly literary concerns shared by groups of writers, the same is not strictly true of ‘existentialism’. And yet it was through the literary works – plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs – of Sartre, Beauvoir and, arguably, Albert Camus that existentialism reached an audience beyond the narrow bounds of continental European academic philosophy.

Sartre and Beauvoir were not philosophers who turned to literature in order to ‘put their ideas across’ to a wider public; neither were they writers who dabbled in philosophy. In France, philosophy and literature had long been seen as complementary.