The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death (ISBN 0684832402) written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973, was awarded the Pulitzer prize in 1974, two months after the author's death. The book builds largely on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and one of Freud's colleagues, Otto Rank. It is not easy to summarize this ground-breaking work.
The main thrust of The Denial of Death is that most of human activity is aimed at denying one's own mortality. The full realization of one's own mortality is mostly unbearable, absolutely terrifying and horrific. Man transcends this problem in the concept of heroism. By being heroic, man feels he has meaning, a purpose, something that will never die. One can be a hero to the eye of God, to the State, to the eyes of his peers, to his family, etc. Without a hero system, man becomes mad in the face of his own mortality or numb to the awareness of it.
Another theme running throughout the book is that humanities traditional "hero-systems" i.e. religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason. In other words, science is undermining faith. We need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in the grand scheme of things, i.e. immortal.