The most important 20th-century philosopher associated with existentialism was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose Being and Time (1927) offered an alternative to the traditional separation of subject and object, observed and observer, by describing human existence as a "being there," a "situated" time-bound consciousness aware of the past and the future and filled with anxiety by the knowledge of its own death. To evade that awareness, we use language to shield ourselves, thus living an "inauthentic" life, a life of denial, characterized by depersonalizing generalizations. An example of the latter, drawn from Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), is the statement "all men are mortal," a truth rendered abstract and unreal by its universality; in saying "all men," we arm ourselves against the reality of "I am mortal." But the authentic life is there for us to choose, and in that choice lies our freedom. Heidegger's difficult language and arcane ideas were adapted and made more accessible by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), whose work bridged the gap between philosophy and literature. In literature, the term existentialist necessarily takes on a looser, less systematic meaning than it does in philosophy, but even existential philosophers, notably Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre, have had a tendency to rely on literary devices in communicating their ideas.

As in philosophy, there were 19th-century forerunners of existential literature, notably Leo Tolstoy, as we have seen, and his great Russian contemporary Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81), whose Notes from Underground (1864) is a passionate monologue by an embittered, angry, self-destructive figure, defiantly asserting his freedom to say "no" to technological progress and the "good life." His transatlantic equivalent is the eponymous hero of Herman Melville's (1819-91) Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), whose simple but resolute "I prefer not to" exhibits the individual's ontological freedom.

In the 20th century, existentialist ideas take a more nihilistic turn in the novels and stories of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), which are peopled with characters engaged in a quest to determine the meaning of existence, but who are frustrated and condemned by an inexplicable system. His Spanish contemporary Miguel de Unamuno represents in his fiction and nonfiction the need to create meaning in one's life regardless of the final truth. In France, Andre Gide (1869-1951) explored the theme of the "gratuitous act," the unmotivated deed, a demonstration of the essential freedom that underlies the human condition.

The three figures most intimately associated with literary existentialism are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86), and Albert Camus (1913-60). Although the relationship of Sartre and Camus was a stormy one and the personal life of De Beauvoir and Sartre raises eyebrows among feminists, all three benefited creatively and intellectually from their interactions. For many, the quintessential existentialist fiction is Sartre's Nausea (1938), a novel cast in the form of the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a historian/biographer. The diary details Roquentin's daily routine, his library research on the 18th-century subject of his projected biography, his casual encounters, sexually and socially, with others, but it primarily deals with his overwhelming sense of nausea. The nausea becomes the precondition for a revelation that comes to him upon encountering the root of an old chestnut tree: "And then, all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day; existence had suddenly unveiled itself." And the unveiling brings with it the realization that it exists for no reason. It is absurd. Existence is not necessary; it is contingent, something that has happened by chance. Existence is naked and formless and therefore beyond rational categories. Worse still, it is nothingness. And yet, Roquentin discovers something of value, represented in the song "Some of These Days," written by a New York Jew and sung by a black American woman. Listening to the tune, Roquentin declares, "I feel something brush against me and I dare not move because I am afraid it will go away . . . a sort of joy." He resolves to write a novel. Perhaps, as the song does for the composer and the singer, it will justify his existence.

During his lifetime, Albert Camus always rejected the term existentialist. But his fiction, such as his 1942 novel The Stranger, and his plays, such as his 1945 Caligula, as well as his powerful 1942 metaphysical essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," invoke certain existentialist themes, particularly the notion of the absurd. In the novel commonly regarded as his finest, The Fall (1956), Camus engages the basic existentialist question of the inauthentic life. The first-person narrator, who calls himself Jean-Baptiste Clamence, is a Parisian, now living in Amsterdam, telling his story, his confession, to a silent listener in a local bar. In his former life in Paris, Clamence had been a successful lawyer or, rather, had played that role, since role-playing and judging people are the chief occupations of a Parisian. Clamence had enjoyed great success in this world, both professionally and socially. He is on top of the world. His fall begins when, one evening, returning home over a bridge, he hears the sound of laughter but looking around, can find no one. Sometime later, while passing over the same bridge in Paris, he walks by a woman leaning against the rail. A moment later he hears a splash and a voice crying for help. He moves on without helping. Years later, when he is on board a ship, he sees something floating in the ocean, thinks for a moment that it might be a person drowning, but a second later recognizes that it is simply flotsam. He realizes that the laughter and the cry for help that he ignored will haunt him for the rest of his life. As a result, he begins to examine his life and to see himself as split in two, the outer self, acting, and the inner self, alienated by the process of self-reflection. In response, he develops the split role of judge/penitent. It is his role to bring others to acknowledge their guilt (for everyone is guilty), while continuing to acknowledge his own. In the novel's conclusion his listener visits him as he lies suffering from a fever in his room. As he tries to draw his listener into the elaborate web of guilt and penance he has woven, the listener responds with a laugh. The laugh, plus the revelation that the listener is himself a Paris lawyer, leaves open the question of whether or not Clamence is talking to himself in some delusional state. The final interpretation, as well as the application of Clamence's confession to life, becomes the responsibility of the individual reader.

The critic Brian Fitch raises an interesting point about the novel’s relation to existentialism: In 1952, Camus had a falling out with Sartre, more serious and long-lasting than the rift depicted in de Beauvoir's The Mandarins. Echoes of the language of the quarrel appear in The Fall in a manner that might suggest Camus's acknowledging the validity of Sartre's criticism of him. But Fitch argues that Clamence's comments--"Once upon a time, I was always talking of freedom. At breakfast I used to spread it on my toast"--constitute "a kind of parody of Sartrean existentialism."

Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins (1954) is less an existentialist novel than a novel about existentialists. Drawing on her long relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and their friendship with Albert Camus, she creates an autobiographical story that fictionalizes the events surrounding the lives of these three people. The story opens in 1944 at a Christmas party in recently liberated Paris, when Anne (the de Beauvoir character) and Robert (Sartre) join Henri (Camus), his lover, Paula, and their friends, who had assisted Henri in publishing the Resistance newspaper L'Espoir. Anne and Robert are the married parents of a teenage daughter, Nadine.

The story is told in a first-person narration by Anne and, alternately, from the third-person perspective of Henri. Anne's account primarily centers on her passionate love affair with an American writer Lewis (based upon de Beauvoir's love affair with the Chicago-based novelist Nelson Algren, best known as the author of The Man with the Golden Arm). Although deeply in love, Anne finds herself more profoundly connected to Robert and her life in France. Eventually frustrated by her ambivalence, Lewis breaks off the relationship. The central event in Henri's story is the breakup of his friendship with Robert. He and Robert had been the leaders of a postwar effort to establish a left-wing alternative to communism, but sympathetic to the goals of the Soviet Union. The split, which mirrors closely an actual quarrel between Sartre and Camus, erupts over Henri's revelation in 1949 of the existence of slave-labor camps in the Soviet Union. To Robert, such exposure undermines the efforts to spread socialism throughout the world and strengthens the hand of the United States in the newly emerging Cold War. For Henri, any attempt to cover up the truth is a basic betrayal of his ideals. The rift is healed when Henri finds himself in a similar dilemma, where he has to compromise his integrity in order to save the life of his mistress. Both come to recognize that other demands, personal or political, inevitably complicate and taint one's idealism, leaving one, at best, with a choice between the lesser of two evils.

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