Existential America. By George Cotkin. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii, 359 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-8018-7037-2.)

Abstract

George Cotkin's Existential America is an ambitious attempt to probe the origins and development of an attitude that cut through much of the social, political, and cultural history of the United States. According to the author, the existential grounds of American culture from the early settlements onwards “functioned not as benumbing forces, but as goads to action and commitment” (p. 7). Along with native sources such as transcendentalism, pragmatism, and the most prominent members of the American Renaissance, Cotkin includes Søren Kierkegaard, whose work he deems to be crucial in the development of existentialism in America since the late 1940s, vis-à-vis its French counterparts. I find very illuminating the tension that Cotkin details between the New York intellectuals, on the one hand, and the European existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau-voir, on the other. Also, he sheds light on the complexity of the American group from a perspective that diverges from those of Alan Wald and Harvey Teres, among other historians who have researched them. Cotkin too devotes space to canonical literary productions of American existentialism, pays special attention to the African American writers Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and several representatives of the beat movement, and devotes an enlightening section to the maverick Norman Mailer, whose essay “The White Negro” (1957) actually led literary and cultural historians to rethink the differences between the European and American factions of existentialism.