ABSTRACT
The story of Soren Kierkegaard's assorted biographers could be written up as a drama all on its own. There is, indeed, a fitting ambiguity as to what the "correct" interpretation of Kierkegaard's life actually is, so enigmatic was its plot, details, and main protagonist. When first published in 1973, Josiah Thompson's radical biography caused more than a few ripples in the unfolding world of Anglophone Kierkegaard scholarship. Where Walter Lowrie sought to open the stage curtain for the great thinker and hero of the Christian faith, Thompson wanted to probe beneath the facade of the enigmatic genius. Thompson highlights themes like recurrent family tragedy, Kierkegaard's relationship with his father, physical disfigurement, personal guilt, sibling envy, as the factors that lay behind the Dane's philosophy. It is in this sense that Thompson's reading remains "existentialist" at its core. Thompson's relentlessly critical approach is, in one sense, unsurprising given Thompson's broader investigative interests.
