Kierkegaard: A Single Life

Discover a new understanding of Kierkegaard’s thought and his life a story filled with romance betrayal humor and riots. Kierkegaard like Einstein and Freud is one of those geniuses whose ideas permeate the culture and shape our world even when relatively few people have read their works. That lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is about to change. This lucid new biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse presents the genius as well as the acutely sensitive man behind the brilliant books. Scholarly and accessible Kierkegaard: A Single Life introduces his many guises—the thinker the lover the recluse the writer the controversialist—in prose so compelling it reads like a novel. One chapter examines Kierkegaard’s influence on our greatest cultural icons—Kafka Barth Bonhoeffer Camus and Martin Luther King Jr. to name only a few. A useful appendix presents an overview of each of Kierkegaard’s works for the scholar and lay reader alike.