Authors Like Søren Kierkegaard

Augustine of Hippo

Roman North African · Confessions (c. 400), The City of God (426)

Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, taught rhetoric in Carthage, Rome and Milan, and became Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions, written in his forties, addresses God directly and tells the story of his early life, from stealing pears as a boy to his conversion in a garden in Milan in 386.

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Blaise Pascal

French · Provincial Letters (1656–57), Pensées (1670)

Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematician and inventor who built one of the first mechanical calculators. After a religious experience on the night of 23 November 1654, which he recorded on a sheet of paper sewn into his coat, he turned to theology. The Pensées, fragments of an unfinished defence of Christianity, were published eight years after his death and include his wager on the existence of God.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for belonging to a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to a Siberian prison camp. Notes from Underground is narrated by a bitter former civil servant who argues that people will act against their own interests simply to prove they are free. In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor, who arrests the returned Christ.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

German · The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Nietzsche (1844–1900) became a professor of classical philology at Basel at 24 and spent his last decade incapacitated after a collapse in Turin in 1889. The Gay Science contains his parable of the madman who announces that God is dead. He never read Kierkegaard; the Danish critic Georg Brandes urged him to in 1888, shortly before his collapse.

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Miguel de Unamuno

Spanish · The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Mist (1914), Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr (1931)

Unamuno (1864–1936) was born in Bilbao and was rector of the University of Salamanca; he taught himself Danish to read Kierkegaard in the original. In Mist a character visits Unamuno himself to argue about his fate, and in Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr a village priest who has lost his faith keeps preaching for his parishioners’ sake. He first welcomed Franco’s uprising in 1936, then broke with it publicly, and died under house arrest.

Franz Kafka

Prague-born, writing in German · The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926)

Kafka (1883–1924) worked as a lawyer for an insurance institute in Prague and published little in his lifetime. In August 1913, while he was courting Felice Bauer, he read a selection from Kierkegaard’s journals and wrote in his diary that Kierkegaard bore him out like a friend. Like Kierkegaard, he gave up marriage, breaking off his engagement to Bauer twice, because he believed it could not coexist with his writing.

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Martin Buber

Austrian-born Israeli · I and Thou (1923), Between Man and Man (1947)

Buber (1878–1965) was born in Vienna, taught in Frankfurt until the Nazis forced him out, and moved to Jerusalem in 1938. I and Thou argues that a person becomes fully real only in direct relation with another. In The Question to the Single One (1936), later collected in Between Man and Man, he criticised Kierkegaard for picturing the individual alone before God, cut off from other people.

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Albert Camus

French-Algerian · The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947)

Camus (1913–1960) was born in French Algeria, worked as a journalist and edited the Resistance paper Combat. In The Myth of Sisyphus he took Kierkegaard seriously and then rejected his leap of faith as “philosophical suicide”, an escape from the absurd rather than an answer to it. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960.

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Fernando Pessoa

Portuguese · Message (1934), The Book of Disquiet (1982)

Pessoa (1888–1935) worked as a commercial translator in Lisbon and wrote under dozens of invented names, the best known being Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, each with his own biography and style. The Book of Disquiet, attributed to the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, was assembled from fragments left in a trunk and published nearly fifty years after his death.

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Walker Percy

American · The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966), Lost in the Cosmos (1983)

Percy (1916–1990) was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and trained as a doctor before tuberculosis ended his medical career; during his recovery he read Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The Moviegoer, which takes its epigraph from The Sickness unto Death, follows a New Orleans stockbroker in the week before his thirtieth birthday, and won the National Book Award in 1962.