At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

Richard Wright, who, after first meeting the existentialists, wrote to his friend Gertrude Stein that he could not understand why Americans insisted on seeing it as a gloomy philosophy: to him it meant optimism and freedom.