Word: existentialists
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...Jacques Barzun, Lionel and Diana Trilling. "What they think today," says he, "you're apt to find yourself, in a Sears, Roebuckish way, sort of thinking tomorrow." Documenting the We group's insulation from reality, Elliott notes a complaint by Mary McCarthy that when a visiting French existentialist asked to be taken to a typical American restaurant, neither Mary nor any of her friends could think of a single one in New York City. Another We, Elliott recalls, once wrote in Partisan Review that "nobody who had not been a Communist and then left the party could pretend...
SAINT GENET, by Jean-Paul Sartre. The eminent existentialist argues that Jean Genet, thief, pederast, poet, pornographer, playwright (The Blacks), is a walking allegory of modern...
...other playwright can quite match Genet at holding the audience at bay, taut between open distaste and hypnotic fascination. Even so, Genet as artist is still much smaller in scale than Genet as existentialist hero. Much of his autobiographical writing is so sleazily scabrous that it loses even shock value. On the stage, his imagination sometimes runs to episodes so melodramatically contrived that they miss theatrical effectiveness, as when the revolutionary leader in The Balcony emasculates himself onstage...
...Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, by Geoffrey Gorer. British Anthropologist Gorer makes De Sade seem more rake than sadist, but he makes clear why De Sade's writings were revived by existentialist thinkers...
...Among previous winners: Existentialist Philosopher Karl Jaspers, Roman Catholic Theologian Romano Guardini, Painters Marc Chagall and Oscar Kokoschka...