Writing in the tradition of Blaise Pascal and Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, the Romanian-born E. M. Cioran was France's most original twentieth-century philosopher-moralist. He is also acclaimed as one of the greatest prose writers in French of his time. His stylistic incisiveness has led some French critics to put him in the same class as Paul Valéry, an ultimate accolade of linguistic purity and stylistic perfection.

Emil Cioran was born on 8 April 1911 in the village of Rasinari, Transylvania, Romania, then still a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to Emilian and Elvira Comaniciu Cioran. He had an older sister, Virginia; a brother, Aurel, was born two years later. Cioran's father was a Romanian Orthodox priest from one of the wealthiest and most prestigious families of free peasants in the village. On his mother's side Cioran was descended from a long line of Orthodox priests from the Fagaras...