Inspired by Jerry Coyne’s call for a spring book reading list here, I’d like to offer to readers here the best book that you’ve probably never heard of: Hazel Barnes’s Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility (University of Nebraska Press 1959), which is, unfortunately, out of print, but still available used through Amazon. Barnes was the first translator of Sartre into English, and Yale Review said this of her book:
The book captures much of the forlorn grandeur of the existentialist vision of the human condition.
Barnes spent her academic career at the University of Colorado and I’ve long wished that a publisher would rediscover her—she writes beautifully and profoundly—and bring her back into print for agnostic and atheist readers in the 21st century.
