A number of novelists and filmmakers have depicted emptiness. The concept of "emptiness" was important to a "good deal of 19th–20th century Western imaginative literature". Novelist Franz Kafka depicted a meaningless bizarre world in "The Trial" and the existentialist French authors sketched a world cut off from purpose or reason in Jean-Paul Sartre's "La Nausée" and Albert Camus' "L'étranger". Existentialism influenced 20th century poet T.S. Eliot, whose poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” describes an "anti-hero or alienated soul, running away from or confronting the emptiness of his or her existence". Professor Gordon Bigelow argues that the existentialist theme of "spiritual barrenness is commonplace in literature of the 20th century", which in addition to Eliot includes Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Anderson.