When Mircea Eliade left Romania, his native country, he was 37 years old. The Romanian communist regime was soon to be established and take a hold on the whole country for decades. It was going to be one of the most oppressive communist regimes in Europe. After spending a few years in France, Eliade moved to the United States in 1956. He settled in Chicago where, together with Joachim Wach, he founded the "Chicago School"—a prominent entity dedicated to the study of religions.

Mircea Eliade was the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion, published in 1987 by Macmillan—one of the most monumental works on the study of religions. Its second edition was published in 2004 and is now an essential reference tool in many academic and public libraries.

Numerous studies and articles have been devoted to Eliade's scientific work. This remarkable scholar, who lectured and published research in four Western languages, has written all his works in his native Romanian. Far from home, he continued to think and create "Romanian" as a true representative of Romanian culture. One of the most remarkable qualities of Mircea Eliade's creativity is that the scientist and the writer in it live in harmony, in visionary unity.

One could argue that his travels to India, starting in 1928 (in Calcutta, he studied Indian philosophy and the necessary Sanskrit grammar with real zeal), have strongly contributed to the way Eliade perceived the world in its crushing and magical totality. The writer owes the figurative language in his scientific works, and the researcher offers interesting plots. It is unlikely that specific scientific knowledge automatically generates a literary plot, but the rich erudition constantly feeds the artistic imagination of the fiction writer. Eliade's most renowned novel Maitreyi represents both sides of his literary vocation—the realistic and the fantastic. The novel was almost unanimously accepted as his best work. It was written in 1933, when the author was 26 years old. It is innovative in one very particular aspect: it is a realistic text that turns into a mythology of love and adoration. One could call Maitreyi  "exotic" because of its setting, but the book is so much more than tha. The novel is the belletristic equivalent of all the anthropological work published in Eliade's later years—such as Essential Sacred Writings From Around the World. 

Selected Works

Encyclopedia of Religion

 

 

 

 

 

Essential Sacred Writings From Around the World

 

 

 

 

 

Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism

 

 

 

 

 

A History of Religious Ideas

 

 

 

 

 

The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History