Evergood was moved by the violence and destruction of World War II to create a number of paintings on the theme of war. His concern did not end with the Allied victory. In July 1946 he wrote to Herman Baron of the A.C.A. Gallery, "What with the Bikini fiasco and OPA [Office of Price Administration] this has been a pretty unsteading [sic] week" (Archiv. Am. Art, American Contemporary Artists Gallery Papers, microfilm roll D304, ft 58). During 1946 and 1947 he created images such as New Death, 1947 (Terry Dintenfass, New York), which conveyed his anxiety about the new atomic age. Everybody Wants to Live, probably painted in the winter of 1946-47, demonstrates his skepticism over the ability of the victors to ensure a safe world. He depicted a narrow city street, typical of the area where he lived in lower Manhattan. During 1946 the house in which he lived was the scene of a murder and drug dealings, events that heightened his general state of anxiety. In the painting the pedestrians’ attention is drawn toward the fantastic objects floating in the sky. The image of a sky chaotically filled with strange objects or birds was typical of Evergood’s postwar paintings. The appearance of the colorful, striped flying machines at first seems innocent enough; their shape, however, recalls the airships that crowded the skies of Europe during the war. The other floating objects resemble underwater mines. The onlookers’ expressions range from wonder and excitement to apprehension, suggesting that the ordinary citizen did not fully comprehend the ramifications of these war machines. Another ominous note to this bizarre scene is the sinister presence of the fat twins in the foreground, whose hats and cloaks may be military uniforms. Evergood realized the expressive potential of color and manipulated it to the fullest in this painting, presenting the flying objects in cheerful hues while the overall image is pervaded by a monochromatic gray. Not only does that color have a negative connotation, it is also the color of airplanes and other machines of war. Much of the scene is suffused by a soft haze, which may have been meant to be radioactive dust, for it appears in some of his other antiatomic images. Evergood was in Santa Fe when an atomic bomb was tested and recorded how he "was sickened physically and mentally by these preparations for human destruction" (Kendall F. Taylor, "Philip Evergood and the Humanist Tradition," Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1979, p. 106). The title Everybody Wants to Live is a plea for the future of mankind, but even this plea has its ironic twist. Evergood may have originally entitled the painting less positively, for "nobody wants to die" was written on the back of the canvas and then covered over with white paint.

The beginning of every century inspires a general sentiment of endless possibilities, and the twentieth century was no exception. A modern age marked by technological wonders had begun, and the United States was to be its focal point. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s most brilliant thinkers, explained that, unlike Europe, “the New World expanded the human imagination.” Young American students still traveled to Europe, especially Paris, for their initiation to art, but the progressive new ideas of cubism, futurism, and surrealism that they imbibed only found their true home in the United States.
As demonstrated by the first generation of modernists in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, American artists rarely abandoned referential ties to the physical world completely. The simplification of form, multiple perspectives, and ideas about the fourth dimension that radical proponents of cubism espoused would find their most compelling American expressions in the fishermen of Marsden Hartley, and the animal bones and skulls of Georgia O’Keeffe. To these artists, abstraction meant the synthesis of personal experience.
The introduction of psychological ideas, first in the form of Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and later in the writings and art of the surrealists, found an enthusiastic audience in America. Such new concepts not only expanded ideas about the human mind but also encouraged the liberation of social conduct, in particular, sexual mores. Women increasingly became involved in creative aspects of the new modern age. In 1934 the Los Angeles artists Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson issued the only surrealist manifesto to appear in the United States, thereby demonstrating that in a relatively short time California had seriously challenged New York as the leader of the brave new world.

On July 2, 1946, the day after the United States exploded an atomic test-bomb on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, Evergood wrote to his New York dealer about how unsettling life had become. Subsequently he created a series of paintings expressing the anxieties of the atomic age. In Everybody Wants to Live, politics and personal events combine to form a nightmarish street scene. The setting is Greenwich Village, in lower Manhattan, where Evergood lived. During 1946, Evergood’s brownstone dwelling was the scene of drug dealing and murder; thus the street locale he depicts is not a hospitable place. The pedestrians are entranced by fantastic flying objects, which, despite their pastel colors and striped decorations, suggest wartime dirigibles and underwater mines. In many of Evergood’s paintings his hues verge on the garish, but here a monochromatic gray dominates. Much of the scene is suffused by a soft haze, which may represent radioactive fallout, for it appears in several of the artist’s anti-bomb paintings. The paired figures in the foreground appear terrified. Evergood had painted Twin Celebrities, a portrait of the twin Jewish social-realist painters Raphael and Moses Soyer, several years before. In this postwar painting the twin reference may thus allude to the fate of the Jewish people. By changing the title of this work from the original Nobody Wants to Die – written on the back of the canvas and then painted over – to the more positive Everybody Wants to Live, Evergood made a plea for all mankind.