-:- an Existential Reading List by Katharena -:-

Karl Barth, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, William Blake, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, E. M. Cioran, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heidegger, William James, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Abraham H. Maslow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Blaise Pascal, Jean Paul Sartre, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Tillich, Theatre of the Absurd

Karl Barth --(1886-1968), Swiss Protestant theologian, widely regarded as one of the most notable Christian thinkers of the 20th century.

Simone de Beauvoir --(1908-1986), French writer, existentialist, and feminist whose works include The Second Sex and The Coming of Age, a study of how different cultures view old age.

Samuel Beckett --(1906-1989), Irish-born writer whose novels include Murphy and Malone Dies. Beckett is known to a wider audience for his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape. He won the 1969 Nobel Prize for literature.

William Blake --(1757-1827), English poet, painter, engraver, and visionary mystic whose hand-illustrated series of lyrical and epic poems, beginning with Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, form one of the most strikingly original and independent bodies of work in the Western cultural tradition. Blake is now regarded as one of the earliest and greatest figures of Romanticism. Yet he was ignored by the public of his day and was called mad because he was single-minded and unworldly; he lived on the edge of poverty and died in neglect.

Martin Buber --(1878-1965), Austrian-born Judaic scholar and philosopher whose influential I and Thou posits a direct personal dialogue between God and the individual.

Albert Camus --(1913-1960), French writer and philosopher whose works, such as The Stranger and The Plague, concern the absurdity of the human condition. He won the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature.

Emil Mihai Cioran --(1911 - 1995), A Romanian writer who spent most his life in Paris writing 'a philosophical romance on modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease. His short, biting and often humorous aphorisms of normally no more than three lines reveal more than several volumes of another author's work on the same subject. His essays display the same deadly accuracy and possess a density that can make reading three pages an ordeal.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky --(1821-1881), Russian writer whose works combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight. His four great novels are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov.