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

The existentialists lived in times of extreme ideology and extreme suffering, and they became engaged with events in the world whether they wanted to or not — and usually they did. The story of existentialism is therefore a political and a historical one: to some extent, it is the story of a whole European century.