He had already published his one hundredth article by the time he entered the University of Bucharest in 1925. At the University, he became a devoted disciple of the philosopher Nae Ionescu, who taught him the importance of life experience, commitement, intuition, and spiritual or psychological reality of mental worlds.

In 1928 he received from the maharaja of Kassimbazar a grant to study Indian philosophy with Surendranath Dasgupta at the University of Calcutta. He also spent six months in the ashram of Rishikesh in the Himalayas.

In 1932 Eliade returned to Romania and was appointed to asist Nae Ionescu at the University of Bucharest in the following year.

In 1934 he marries Nina Mares. She will die in November, 1944.

In 1940 he was appointed cultural attaché at the Royal Romanian Legation in war-torn London. In the following year he became a cultural counselor in Lisbon, in neutral Portugal. When the war was over in 1945, Eliade went directly to Paris, thus starting the life of self-imposed exile. Although he could write and lecture in French, starting a new life in a foreign country at the age of thirty-eight required considerable adjustment.

In 1946 he was invited to serve as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne. He then proceeded to publish such famous works as Techniques du Yoga ( 1948 ), Traité d’histoire des religions (1949), Le mythe de l’eternel retour ( 1949 ), Le chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l’extase ( 1951 ), and so on.

In 1950 he marries Christinel Cotescu, the sister of  Ionel Perlea.

In 1956 Eliade was invited by the University of Chicago to deliver the Haskell Lectures, which were published under the title Birth and Rebirth ( 1958 ). 

In 1957 he joined the University of Chicago faculty and continued to live that city after his retirement. At the age of his death in 1986, he was the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus.

Eliade made a deep impression on young readers with such works as Cosmos and History (1959), The Sacred and the Profane ( 1959 ), Myths, Dreams and Mysteries ( 1960 ), Myths and Reality ( 1963 ), Images and Symbols ( 1969 ), Zalmoxis ( 1972 ), The Quest ( 1975 ) and others. The fact that Eliade was willing to use nonphilosophical and nontheological terms in an elegant literary style to discuss religios subjects attracted many secularized youths.

Eliade’s last major undertaking in his life was the Encyclopedia of Religion. As he stated himself, what he had in mind was not a dictionary but an encyclopedia – a selection of all the important ideas and beliefs, rituals and myths, symbols and persons, all that played a role in the universal history of the religious experience of humankind from the Paleolithic age to our time.

Throughout his life, Eliade never claimed that he had the answer to the riddle of life, but he was willing to advance daring hypotheses.

On 22 april, 1986, at 9:40 Mircea Eliade dies ( in Chicago ).