These thirteen essays span twenty years but have a surprising continuity, as the Introduction, written especially for this collection, explains. Four brilliant essays examining Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Buber. Each is seen in a new perspective (the Appreciation of Tolstoy, for example, is eye-opening). One chapter contrasts Nietzsche with the leading existentialists, and another explores the reception of existentialism in the United States. Throughout, the author's thrust id critical and constructive and never merely expository. A devastating critique of Heidegger serves as the springboard for Walter Kaufmann's own ideas about death. Against Buber's dualism of the I-Thou and the I-It and Marcuse's extreme Manichaeism, the author develops his own position. The volume includes his seminal essay "The Faith of a Heretic," as well as previously unpublished "Death Without Dread" and two lectures on the future of the Jews and Jewish identity, one never before published, the other widely reprinted. This book blends critical scholarship with the voice of personal experience. It is an invaluable companion volume to Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism From Dostoevsky To Satre, which it supplements by dealing with religion and death.