Franz Kafka (1883-1924) - Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague to upwardly mobile parents. He and his sisters were raised by governess's and as the familys financial situation improved they moved severl times to better and better apartments. He grew up, started writing and hung out with people his father thought were weird, he also became a vegitarian. He wrote many short works, including Metamorphisis but didn't recieve any presitgious awards. His health was always bad and he died in 1883 of Tuberculosis. He had requested that all his manuscripts be destroyed but they were not, instead his friend Max Brod had them published after his death.
Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989) Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. Nothing of any importance happened in his childhood. When he became an adult he met and worked for James Joyce. Joyce influenced him and he began writing. He wrote short stories, some novels and plays, inculding Waiting for Godot. His parents worried about him not settleing down with a wife and a real job. He eventully did marry, but he always wrote. He and his wife Susanne joined the Resistance and in 1941 when France was invaded they had to flee Paris and live on a farm in the South of France for 3 years. He died in 1989 of Emphysema, just 4 months after his wife.
John Paul Satre (1905 -1980) - John Paul Satre was born in 1905 in Paris. He was drafted into WWII and was imprisioned in Germany for a year until he was let go, or escaped. He wrote several novels, collections of Short Stories and plays, including No Exit. He was an existentialist philosopher and an almost communist. He received the Noble Prize for Literature but refused to accept it. Satre died in 1980 of lund issues.
Other Existentialist Authors/Philosophers:
Beckett, Buber, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Heidegger, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Pascal, Sartre, Tillich, Nikolay Berdyayev
Click Here to see where I got the list and to read a little more about these people
Okay, I was going to put the titles of Existentialist works here but I've found that it's kind of repetative becuase when I search existentialst works guess what comes up? The names that I've already listed above. If you click on the link you get an interesting page, it mostly focus's on a couple of the people but it mentions everyone listed.
An interesting site I just found is HERE if you click HERE you should be able to go to it. It's called an Introduction to existentialism and has lots of links to authors and goes on and on about how to say what existentialsim is, which is hard to do.
Themes and Components of Characters and Settings
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