Emil Cioran (
April 8,
1911 -
June 20,
1995) was a writer noted for works in the
French language. He was born in
Rasinari[?],
Romania, and died in
Paris, having variously lived in
Bucharest,
Berlin, and elsewhere. He attended Bucharest University, but a 1937 scholarship from the French Institute in Bucharest brought him to Paris, where he lived the rest of his life—though he famously said "I have no nationality—the best possible status for an intellectual." His early work was in
Romanian, his latter work in French, and it was mostly in the form of aphorisms and short essays.
William Gass called Cioran's work "a philosophical romance on modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as a agony, reason as disease."