In this chapter I begin by arguing that Améry breaks with Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism following their attempt to reconcile it with Marxism in the 1960s. Next, I posit that Améry’s consistent rejection of political, religious, and aesthetic responses to the problem of existential nihilism lead him to a fundamentally pessimistic view of the human condition. Améry now finds himself at a growing distance from Sartre and his cohorts, but this in turn brings him closer to an alternative existential tradition developed in the interwar period by Shestov and Fondane. Améry’s criticism of Sartre’s Marxist turn echoes Fondane’s earlier critique of historical materialism and defence of existential concerns from the late 1930s. Despite this intellectual proximity to Fondane, Améry’s refusal to entertain religious responses to the problem of existential nihilism contributes to his increasingly pessimistic perspective of the human condition.