In 1928, Emil M. Cioran became a philosophy student at the University of Bucharest, where he continued his study of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, who he discovered while a teenager, in addition to Kantian and Hegelian German Idealism, Phenomenology, Bergson, Shestov and Worringer's aesthetics.
Bucharest was a cultural and political hotbed which gave birth to the '27 generation', a group of students like Cioran who sought cultural revolution. Two members of the group would become lifelong friends of Cioran: Mircea Eliade, who became an influential religious scholar and Eugene Ionesco, who became one of the twentieth century's best playwrights and founded the Theater of the Absurd.
In 1928, Cioran graduated with a thesis on Bergsonian intuitionism. He also began publishing articles, often in support of the extreme right wing Iron Guard, in several leading publications. His first book, on the Heights of Despair, was published in 1934 and won the prestigious King Carol II Foundation for Art and Literature Prize, which allowed Cioran to study in Berlin from 1933 to 1935.
