Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard lived on his inheritance in Copenhagen, broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen for reasons he spent the rest of his life examining, and in a dozen years wrote under a series of pseudonyms the books that founded existentialism: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and the leap of faith, Philosophical Fragments, on how the eternal can enter time, and The Sickness unto Death. His last years were spent attacking the Danish state church. He died at forty-two, almost unread outside Denmark, and was discovered by the twentieth century as its own.