Soren Kierkegaard was engaged to the woman he loved, then broke off the engagement for reasons he spent the rest of his short life trying to explain — to himself, to her, and to the reading public through a series of pseudonymous books that invented existentialist philosophy. The man who argued that authentic existence requires suffering seemed determined to prove it with his own life.

This episode traces Kierkegaard from his melancholic Copenhagen childhood through the broken engagement with Regine Olsen, the explosive literary output that followed, and the public feud with the Danish church that consumed his final years and may have hastened his death at forty-two.

• Kierkegaard's oppressive upbringing and the father's guilt that cast a shadow over his life
• The engagement to Regine Olsen and the deliberate, agonizing deci ...