Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings...What distinguishes existentialism from other movements in the intellectual history of the West is how it stretched far beyond the literary and academic worlds. Its ideas are captured in film... Its moods are expressed in the paintings... Its emphasis on freedom and the struggle for self-creation informed the radical and emancipatory politics of Martin Luther King Jr…Its engagement with the relationship between faith and freedom and the incomprehensibility of God shaped theological debates…And, with its penetrating analyses of anxiety and the importance of self-realization, the movement has had a profound impact in the development of humanistic and existential approaches to psychotherapy in the work of a wide range of theorists (excerpted from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Jean Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer. Considered a leading figure in existentialism, he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea.