A central theme of Michel Foucault's work as a philosopher and historian is the quest to see through the surface of society and understand the processes going on beneath it. Across a long career that saw him become perhaps the most influential philosopher of the mid-late twentieth century, he applied his efforts to analyzing a range of phenomena and their relationship to power and the individual in society - ranging from the history of mental illness and its classification, to the history of crime and punishment, through to the history of human sexuality. His 1969 essay What is an Author? applies the same approach to the central figure of literary criticism: the author, asking, against the grain of our intuitions, whether an 'author' is truly the real individual who writes a text, or something else.
