The Existential Fiction of Ayi Kwei Armah, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism is a philosophy that flourishes in extreme situations.

Identified with the period of the French Resistance when Frenchmen were held as political prisoners by the Germans, existentialism, with its call for an uncompromised allegiance to a leftist system of values, served to boost the sagging morale of French political prisoners who had witnessed during the Occupation the subversion of their nation's democratic principles by German totalitarianism.