Emil Cioran

Cioran wrote aphorisms about despair, insomnia and the pointlessness of having been born, in Romanian first and then in French, a language he learned to write with obsessive care after moving to Paris in 1937. On the Heights of Despair appeared when he was twenty-three, produced during a stretch of sleeplessness he said ran for years. The part he spent decades avoiding is that during the 1930s he wrote enthusiastically in support of the Iron Guard, Romania's fascist movement, and wrote in praise of the German dictator. He later called those texts the work of a madman and would not have them reprinted. He died in Paris in 1995.