Reddit reviews Existentialism: A Reconstruction

Nobody has mentioned Kierkegaard yet, whom you should definitely read, especially Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. He is often cited as the founder of the "movement." As with other existentialist texts, they tread the line between philosophy and literature and hence raise numerous interpretative problems. I'd also say that you can understand more where Kierkegaard is coming from if you see how he's responding to Hegel - but I still got a lot out of him before reading any Hegel, so don't worry too much about it.

Existentialism as such rather fell out of favour in the academy in the '70s (I mean of course in departments of literature and continental philosophy). As the generation of post-structural theory swept in, committed to anti-humanism, existentialism was washed away as old-fashioned, conservative and too focused on individuals, rather than systems. People criticised Sartre for being the 'wrong kind' of public intellectual, ie. setting himself up as an authority. The dominant approach within literary studies today still has little time for existentialism, which I think is a shame, given that a lot of students come to literature as adolescents when reading these texts (being naive enough to think literature can tell them some about their life, etc).

There's a good "reconstruction" of the philosophical aspects of existentialism here:
http://www.amazon.com/Existentialism-Reconstruction-David-E-Cooper/dp/0631213236
That may be a good primer for you, before you think about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, (early) Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, et al.

Would also add Cioran to that list. The bleakest of the lot - though again more a kind of essayist than a philosopher.

In terms of literature, there's the obvious stuff like Dostoevsky (Devils, Brothers Katamazov, Notes from the Underground) and Sartre/Camus's own texts. Absurdism is also strongly related - Ionesco, for example. Mid-period Beckett can also be read as an absurdist and existentialist: the famous plays like Godot and Endgame, but also look at Krapp's Last Tape, which I think is his best theatrical work. Even better than these is his "Trilogy" of novels: Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The first two, and especially Malone Dies, are amongst my very favourite books.

Gide's "The Immoralist" is in some ways an interesting precursor to Camus, I think. And there are other "existential" first-person narratives like Rilke's Maurids Brigg (I actually hate this) or Knut Hamsun's Hunger.

I would hesitate before characterising Kafka as existentialist - I think there's a lot more going on with him - but there's a lot of resonance. Read the Trial, but better still the short stories - Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, Investigations of a Dog, the Burrow.

It's possibly also worth considering the relationship between existentialism and other movements within other media, eg. expressionism in the visual arts and cinema. But I'm not knowledgable enough to say anything good about this. Look at some Egon Schiele paintings though.