Kierkegaard and existentialism? Maybe not

Eventually Kierkegaard influenced those twentieth century philosophers we today term “existentialists,” such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. Since most of these thinkers were atheists, Kierkegaard’s fame as the “father of existentialism” came at some cost to our understanding of his own concerns as a Christian thinker. To understand his work, one must read him as “the individual” to whom Kierkegaard himself directed his work, seeing him in terms of his own concerns. While Kierkegaard certainly had a great influence on existentialism, it is important not to anachronistically read back into his own work the concerns of these later thinkers.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 518