Caspar Schmidt--for this is Stirner's real name[1]--was born at Baireuth on the 25th October, 1806, and, like Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and other thinkers of the same kind, devoted his time to theological and philosophic studies. After completing these, he took the modest position of a teacher in a high school, and in a girls' school in Berlin. In 1844 there appeared, under the pseudonym "Max Stirner," a book called _The Individual_ _and his Property_, with the dedication which, under these circumstances, is touching: "To my Darling, Marie Doehnhardt." The book appeared like a meteor; it caused for a short time a great deal of talk, and then sank into oblivion for ten years, till the growing stream of Anarchist thought again came back to it in more recent times. A _History of the Reaction_, written after the year 1848, is esteemed as a good piece of historical work; and, besides this, Caspar Schmidt also produced translations of Say, Adam Smith, and other English economists. On the 26th of June, 1856, he ended his life, poor in external circumstances, rich in want and bitterness. That is all that we know of the personality of the man who has raised the idea of personality to a Titanic growth that has oppressed the world. [1] Stirner's chief work, _The Individual and his Property_ (_Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_, Leipsic, 1845), has been reprinted by P. Reclam, at Leipsic, with a good introduction by Paul Lauterbach. The literature about Stirner is almost exclusively confined to a few scattered remarks in larger works, which are not always very appropriate. J. H. Mackay is said to be working at a biography of Stirner. The monograph by Robert Schellwien, _Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche_ (Leipsic, 1892), is quite worthless for our purpose.