Selected as Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement. This clear and engaging new biography liberates Kierkegaard from scholars and shows why he is such a compelling and useful figure.

Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most passionate and provocative modern philosophers, is celebrated as the father of existentialism, although his contemporaries described him as a philosopher of the heart. During a period of about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, his writings explore love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious desire and challenge, while creating a new philosophical style rooted in the inner drama of human existence.

As Christianity seemed to slumber in a changing world, Kierkegaard astonishingly revealed his spiritual strength while exposing the poverty of official religion. His relentless creativity was fueled by his own failures: the relationship with the young woman he promised to marry and then left to devote himself to writing haunted him throughout his life.

Although tormented by the pressure of fame, he lived deliberately among the crowds in Copenhagen, known by all but, as he felt, understood by none. When he collapsed from exhaustion at the age of 42, he was still pursuing the question of existence: how to be human in this world?

The innovative and moving biography by Clare Carlisle recounts Kierkegaard's remarkable life as much as possible from his own perspective, conveying what it was like to be this Socrates of Christianity - as he described, living life forward but understanding it only backward.

Pages: 368, Dimensions: 13.2x13.2cm