Abstract

Marjorie Glicksman Grene (1910–2009) wrote on existentialism as a philosophy with a specific focus on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Her work played an important role in introducing continental philosophy to North American and British thought as she lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. While she gained her PhD from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, she also studied as an exchange student in Germany from 1931 to 1933, had a postdoctoral fellowship in Copenhagen in 1936, lived and worked on farms in Illinois and Ireland, and taught at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, including, for the longest period, at the University of California, Davis (1965–78). Her interpretations are based on a thorough knowledge of the history of philosophy and a wide range of philosophical areas, including European philosophy; Grene attended lectures by Heidegger and Karl Jaspers while on exchange in Europe. While her interest was first piqued by Heidegger’s thought, further research led her to investigate Jaspers’s willingness to combine existential philosophy with the life sciences. I split her often integrated discussions into a focus on five primary thinkers: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, with the most detailed analysis of Sartre as Grene engages with his work in the most depth.