Stages on Life's Way

Defended in September 1841 — after he had returned Regine Olsen's engagement ring, before the final break with her — this academic dissertation is the last book he signed himself before the pseudonymous books began with Either/Or.

The first of the pseudonymous books: an invented editor presenting two invented authors, whose argument Stages on Life's Way would reopen two years later.

Twin of Repetition, published the same October day: both books take up a man who must give up what he loves, one through Abraham and Isaac, the other through an engagement broken off.

A short fiction, subtitled a venture in experimenting psychology: one man's account of a journey back to Berlin, and another man's letters about a love he has fled.

Johannes Climacus signs his first book here and returns in the far longer Postscript; in its author's lifetime this short thought experiment was little read outside Denmark.

Philosophical Fragments had appeared four days earlier under another pseudonym; this is its companion, and it takes a point of church doctrine, inherited sin, and treats it as a problem in psychology.

He meant it to close his authorship and later called it the authorship's turning point; after it, the openly religious writing takes over.

After the Postscript's farewell, the first book he published was, in form, a review of a contemporary novel, and he signed it with his own name.

Begun in the spring of 1846, while the satirical weekly The Corsair was still caricaturing him, it opens the run of signed religious books that fills the years after the Postscript.

Two series of deliberations, a form he set apart from the discourse because it is meant to unsettle a reader rather than console one, published six months after the Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits.

The first book of 1848, the year he later called the richest of his authorship and the year he wrote The Sickness unto Death.

The first of two books signed by Anti-Climacus, with Practice in Christianity following in 1850; Kierkegaard later ranked the pair among the most important things he wrote.

A slim pamphlet, the only book under the initials H.H., salvaged from a planned cycle of ethical-religious essays that he gave up in the spring of 1849.

Kierkegaard judged it the truest of all his books; with The Sickness unto Death it makes up the pair signed by Anti-Climacus.

The last new title he published before three years of public silence, and the book whose planned second series became Judge for Yourselves!

The open, signed form of the criticism that Practice in Christianity had made under a pseudonym, carried in a periodical of his own through the last months of his life.

Of the books on this shelf, the only one he finished and then chose not to publish; it stands between the signed discourses of 1851 and the open attack on the church of 1854–55.