One of Jean-Paul Sartre's greatest existentialist works, The Wall (1939) is a story about the Spanish Civil War (in Spanish, the Guerra Civil) that began July 17, 1936. It ended March 28, 1939, when Nationalist (known in Spanish as the Nacionales, elsewhere usually referred to as Fascists) troops, led by General Francisco Franco, overcame the Spanish Republic's forces and entered Madrid.

The 5 stories (Le mur, Le chambre, Erostrate, Intimate, L'enfance d'un chef) reflect the cruel and absurd experiences Sartre went through as a volunteer during the war. Many nationals went to the aid of the Spanish (George Orwell, Simone Weil) and the defeat of the Republic demoralized the idealists who tried to defeat the fascists. The title story, Le mur coldly documents a story about prisoners who are condemned to death. The lack of emotion, the objectivity and the quiet disgust the narrator feels provide a running theme throughout many of Sartre's later stories. Sartre dedicated the book to Olga Kosakiewicz, a former student of Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong companion.

Albert Camus also treats the theme of man's absurdity in the modern world in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. With the loss of faith comes a loss of the sense of man's dominance in the universe; man just inhabits the universe of which he is not the center anymore.