Søren Kierkegaard

Born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy retired hosier, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard grew up in a household shadowed by his father's melancholy and religious guilt. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard believed God was punishing him for having cursed the Almighty as a boy tending sheep on a Jutland heath, and five of his seven children died before the age of thirty-four. Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, completing a master's thesis on irony in Socrates. In 1841 he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen, an act of renunciation that haunted him for the rest of his life and became the generative wound of his authorship. Over the next decade he produced an astonishing body of work, Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), much of it published under pseudonyms that allowed him to inhabit opposing philosophical positions simultaneously. He attacked Hegel's system-building, insisting that existence could not be reduced to abstract thought, and in doing so laid the foundations of existentialism. In 1854 he launched a savage public assault on the Danish State Church, pouring his remaining strength into a pamphlet series called The Moment. He collapsed on the street on October 2, 1855, and died in a Copenhagen hospital on November 11, at forty-two, having refused communion from any ordained pastor.

In August 1841, Kierkegaard sealed his engagement ring inside a letter and mailed it to Regine Olsen, breaking their engagement in writing. Two months later he ended it again in person, telling her something spectral in him could not be endured by a woman who saw him every day.