E. M. Cioran

Emil Cioran (1911-1995) was a Romanian philosopher. Tormented by debilitating insomnia and unable to finish his doctoral thesis, he wrote his first book, On the Heights of Despair (1934). In 1937, he obtained a doctoral scholarship from the French Institute in Bucharest and moved to Paris. He never attended the course. In 1949, he published his first book in French. The adoption of Molière's language is considered by the author a second birth and earned him increasing fame and readership. Rejecting honors and awards, he remained faithful until his death in 1995 to his congenital pessimism, marked by a subtle irony.