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Reading List · Existentialist LiteratureThe Best Existentialist Authors to Read
Existentialist literature starts from the individual: a person who exists first and has to make meaning through choices, without a fixed nature or ready-made rules to fall back on. Sartre put it as ‘existence precedes essence’. The writers here turn that idea into novels, fragments and philosophical fiction about freedom, anxiety, faith, alienation and responsibility, from nineteenth-century Copenhagen and St Petersburg to post-war Paris, New Orleans and Prague.
The list runs in rough chronological order by birth. It mixes the philosopher-writers usually named as forerunners with novelists whose fiction is widely read as existentialist, and every author has at least one book available in English. Camus and other writers of the absurd sit on a separate Absurdist list; Sartre, Beauvoir and Dostoevsky belong here.
Twelve existentialist authors, and where to start with each
Søren Kierkegaard
1813–1855 · Copenhagen, Denmark
Kierkegaard is widely considered the first existentialist philosopher. Much of his work appeared under pseudonyms such as Johannes de Silentio and Johannes Climacus, a method of indirect communication that lets competing voices argue about faith, anxiety, despair and what it means to become an individual.
His existentialism is Christian, which sets it apart from the atheistic version Sartre developed a century later. Walker Percy, also on this list, read him closely, and his questions about choice and commitment run through much of the fiction that followed.
Read Kierkegaard if you want the religious, questioning roots of existentialist thought.
Start with Fear and Trembling (1843). A meditation on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, arguing that his act cannot be explained by ethics alone and requires the category of faith. Or Either/Or (1843). A pseudonymous work presented as papers edited by ‘Victor Eremita’, often described as his magnum opus.
All Søren Kierkegaard books →Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821–1881 · Moscow, Russia
Dostoevsky’s novels put free will, guilt, suffering and belief under intense pressure. His characters argue with themselves and with God, and often act against their own interests simply to prove that they can. Notes from Underground is regarded as one of the earliest works of existentialist literature.
In 1849 he was sentenced to death for his part in the Petrashevsky Circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to a prison camp in Omsk. Walter Kaufmann’s anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre made him the starting point of the tradition.
Read Dostoevsky if you want existential questions argued out at full intensity by characters on the edge.
Start with Notes from Underground (1864). The bitter, isolated monologue of an unnamed retired civil servant in St Petersburg who rejects reason, progress and the idea of a rational utopia. Or Crime and Punishment (1866). Published two years after Notes from Underground; with The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) it is one of his major novels.
All Fyodor Dostoevsky books →Friedrich Nietzsche
1844–1900 · Röcken, Prussia
Nietzsche wrote philosophy in aphorisms, polemic and poetic narrative. His themes include the death of God, the will to power, the Übermensch and eternal recurrence, all aimed at the question of how to create values once traditional foundations have gone.
His ideas strongly influenced twentieth-century existentialists. Hermann Hesse began reading him in 1895, and Milan Kundera built The Unbearable Lightness of Being around eternal recurrence, so reading him helps with several other writers on this list.
Read Nietzsche if you want philosophy that reads like poetry and prophecy.
Start with Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885). A work of philosophical fiction in four parts in which the prophet Zarathustra teaches the death of God, the Übermensch and eternal recurrence. Or The Gay Science (1882). The book in which the phrase ‘God is dead’ appears most notably.
All Friedrich Nietzsche books →Rainer Maria Rilke
1875–1926 · Prague, Bohemia
Rilke is best known as a poet, for the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (both completed in 1922). His one novel, written largely in Paris, is a semi-autobiographical, expressionistic book whose themes are commonly described as existentialist.
He suits readers who come to existentialism through mood and inner life rather than argument. His letters to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus, published after his death, are the easiest way into his prose.
Read Rilke if you want existential questions approached through solitude, attention and lyric prose.
Start with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Rilke’s only novel, a semi-autobiographical book set largely in Paris and often read for its existentialist themes. Or Letters to a Young Poet (1929). Rilke’s letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, published posthumously by Kappus himself.
All Rainer Maria Rilke books →Hermann Hesse
1877–1962 · Calw, Germany
Hesse’s novels, from Demian (1919) and Siddhartha (1922) to The Glass Bead Game (1943), centre on individuals at odds with the world around them. He began reading Nietzsche in 1895, and Nietzsche’s ideas about the competing pulls of passion and order shaped most of his fiction.
Steppenwolf grew out of a deep personal and spiritual crisis in the 1920s and is often classed as an existential novel. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
Read Hesse if you want a novel about alienation and self-discovery with a mystical streak.
Start with Steppenwolf (1927). Harry Haller, a middle-aged man alienated from bourgeois life and contemplating suicide, is led by Hermine and Pablo towards a hallucinatory ‘Magic Theatre’; first translated into English in 1929.
All Hermann Hesse books →Jean-Paul Sartre
1905–1980 · Paris, France
Sartre is the writer most closely identified with existentialism. His phrase ‘existence precedes essence’ sums up the view that people have no predetermined nature and must define themselves through their choices. He set out the philosophy in Being and Nothingness (1943) and the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (given in 1945, published 1946).
He also put those ideas into fiction and drama: Nausea, the play No Exit (1944) and the trilogy The Roads to Freedom (1945–1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and declined it.
Read Sartre if you want existentialism from its central figure, in fiction as well as theory.
Start with Nausea (1938). Antoine Roquentin, a lonely former adventurer researching an eighteenth-century figure in the port town of Bouville, is overcome by a growing sense of ‘the Nausea’ that makes him doubt the meaning of the world and of his own existence. Or No Exit (1944). Sartre’s one-act play, written the year after Being and Nothingness and the shortest way into his ideas.
All Jean-Paul Sartre books →Simone de Beauvoir
1908–1986 · Paris, France
Beauvoir identified herself as an existentialist and wrote both philosophy and fiction. Her novels examine freedom, angst and the presence of ‘the other’ in close relationships, and her essays, above all The Second Sex (1949), made her central to feminist existentialism.
She was closely associated with Sartre, and scholars still debate how much each shaped the other’s ideas. The Mandarins, her novel of post-war Parisian intellectuals, won the Prix Goncourt in 1954.
Read Beauvoir if you want existentialism tested inside relationships, jealousy and the lives of women.
Start with She Came to Stay (1943). Françoise’s open relationship with Pierre comes under strain when the couple form a ménage à trois with her younger friend Xavière. Or The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). An essay that continues her exploration of existentialist ethics after Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944).
All Simone de Beauvoir books →Richard Wright
1908–1960 · near Roxie, Mississippi, USA
Wright made his name with Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), books about race, violence and survival in America. After moving to Paris in 1946 he became friends with Sartre and Camus and close to Beauvoir, and his fiction entered what is often called his existentialist phase.
Michel Fabre argued that Kierkegaard, Husserl and especially Heidegger shaped Wright’s existentialism more than Sartre did. Granville Hicks called The Outsider one of the first consciously existentialist novels written by an American.
Read Wright if you want existentialism confronted with race, power and American life.
Start with The Outsider (1953). Cross Damon, a Black intellectual reported dead after an accident, takes on a new identity to seek the truth, and is drawn into murder.
All Richard Wright books →Walker Percy
1916–1990 · Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Percy trained as a doctor, contracted tuberculosis in 1942 while performing an autopsy and, while recovering, read Kierkegaard and other existentialist writers. He began to doubt that science could explain the basic mysteries of human existence, and became a Catholic in 1947.
His later novels, The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971) and Lancelot (1977), carry the search into darker territory. The Moviegoer, a lighter, poetic take on existentialist themes, won the National Book Award in 1962.
Read Percy if you want Kierkegaard’s questions in a Southern American novel.
Start with The Moviegoer (1961). Binx Bolling, a young stockbroker in post-war New Orleans who feels alienated from everyday life, sets out on a spiritual search.
Iris Murdoch
1919–1999 · Dublin, Ireland
Murdoch was a philosopher as well as a novelist. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) was the first monograph on Sartre published in English, and her later philosophy is partly a critique of him. Her first novel, Under the Net, has a hero often described as Sartrean.
She named Plato and Simone Weil as her main influences, so her fiction is both shaped by existentialism and an argument with it. She won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea.
Read Murdoch if you want a comic, philosophical British novel in conversation with Sartre.
Start with Under the Net (1954). Evicted by his girlfriend, Jake Donaghue drifts through London and Paris after a former lover, a stolen manuscript and a film-star dog. Or Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). The first monograph on Sartre published in English, written before her first novel.
All Iris Murdoch books →Kōbō Abe
1924–1993 · Tokyo, Japan
Abe wrote surreal, nightmarish fiction about individuals in contemporary society, and is often compared to Kafka for his modernist sensibility. His other novels in English include The Face of Another (1964) and The Box Man (1973).
The Woman in the Dunes is widely read as an existentialist novel. It won the Yomiuri Prize, and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film of it won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
Read Abe if you want a strange, claustrophobic parable about freedom and routine.
Start with The Woman in the Dunes (1962). A Tokyo schoolteacher who misses the last bus is held by villagers in a house at the bottom of the dunes and made to help a woman there dig out the sand; translated into English by E. Dale Saunders in 1964.
All Kōbō Abe books →Milan Kundera
1929–2023 · Brno, Czechoslovakia
Kundera called the novelist ‘an explorer of existence’ and saw the novel as an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. His novels include The Joke (1967) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979).
He emigrated to France in 1975 and died in Paris in 2023. He argued that the European novel had uncovered the great existential themes Heidegger later analysed, which makes him a later, sceptical heir of the tradition.
Read Kundera if you want existential questions about freedom and commitment in a playful, essayistic novel.
Start with The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Set around the Prague Spring of 1968, the novel follows the surgeon Tomáš, his wife Tereza and his lover Sabina, setting Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence against the idea that a life happens only once. Or The Art of the Novel (1986). Essays in which Kundera sets out his view of the novel as an exploration of existence.
All Milan Kundera books →Which existentialist author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For the earliest existentialist novel — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)
- For the defining existentialist novel — Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938)
- For relationships and freedom — Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay (1943)
- For an American existentialist novel — Richard Wright, The Outsider (1953)
- For a lighter, comic entry point — Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954)
- For a modern parable — Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes (1962)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
What is existentialist literature?
Fiction and philosophical writing that starts from the individual’s existence and freedom: people have no fixed essence and must make meaning through their choices. Sartre summed this up as ‘existence precedes essence’.
Who was the first existentialist writer?
Søren Kierkegaard is widely considered the first existentialist philosopher, and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) is regarded as one of the earliest works of existentialist literature.
Which existentialist novel should I read first?
Sartre’s Nausea (1938) is the classic starting point. For something shorter and stranger, try Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground; for a lighter tone, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net.
Is Albert Camus an existentialist?
Camus is often grouped with Sartre, but his work is usually discussed under absurdism, so he appears on the separate Absurdist list rather than here.
What is the difference between Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s existentialism?
Kierkegaard’s existentialism is Christian and centres on faith and the individual before God; Sartre’s is atheistic and centres on human freedom and responsibility without any given nature.
Are there existentialist novels outside Europe?
Yes. Richard Wright’s The Outsider and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer bring existentialist themes to the United States, and Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is a widely read Japanese example.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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