Born in 1850, Mihai Eminescu ran away with a troupe of travelling actors as a teenager, then studied at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin.  In Romania, he became a school inspector, then a university librarian and newspaper editor. In 1883, he suffered the first of three great attacks of insanity, which was hereditary.  The third attack came in 1889, the year he died. Many Romanians consider Eminescu to be their greatest poet.