Søren Kierkegaard lived a short but intense life from a literary point of view. Born in 1813, he died in 1855 in the midst of a controversial attack on the state church of Denmark. In his forty-two years of life, his published writings fill 25 volumes in the latest English translation, not including his voluminous Journals and Papers. Many of the published works were attributed by Kierkegaard to pseudonyms. This was not an attempt to hide his authorship; in many cases he put his name on the title page as “editor” and it was well known in Copenhagen that he was the author of the works. Rather, the pseudonyms are like fictional characters that Kierkegaard created, whose views and lifestyle may be quite different from Kierkegaard's own.

Kierkegaard was far from an academic philosopher, and in many ways not primarily a philosopher at all. He liked to think of himself as a kind of missionary, who had been assigned the task of “reintroducing Christianity into Christendom”. The idea of “Christendom”, according to Kierkegaard, involved a confusing illusion. People born into a Christian country come to believe that they are Christians regardless of whether or not they have any Christian convictions that shape their lives. Kierkegaard thus saw his task as one of helping people who are already “Christians of a sort” to become Christians in truth.