From 1870 to 1940, the experience of nothingness swept through the educated class of Europe. The "disease" hardly seemed to touch well-fed, active, busy Americans. Even philosophers like Sidney Hook and Charles Frankel found existentialist literature on the subject vague, foreign, and self-serving. In America things were always looking up. (p2)
the experience of nothingness is now the point from which nearly every reflective man begins his adult life. (p14)
Nihilism is an ideological interpretation imposed on the experience of nothingness. (p13)