Emil Cioran; Romanian Author Noted for Works in French

Emil Cioran, 84, Romanian author and essayist who was regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of French-language prose. A gloomy nihilist who described himself as being “obsessed with the worst,” Cioran was honored this year by his publisher, Gallimard, with publication of his complete works in a single volume. His first book, “On the Peaks of Despair,” published in Bucharest in 1933, won the Royal Academy prize for young authors. Two more followed--”The Book of Misunderstandings” and “Of Tears and Saints”--before he won a French Institute scholarship to Paris in 1937. Cioran never left France thereafter. He published 14 works--collections of aphorisms, short stories and essays--between 1949 and this year, when a book of conversations and his collected works appeared. On Tuesday in Paris of the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.