This thesis is centred on the work of Portuguese writer José Régio (1901-1969). He was a teacher-writer and, arguably, the most philosophical of Portuguese school novel authors. In his novel ‘A Drop of Blood’ (1945), Régio shows interest in the formation of the artist as the special object of education – the ‘marked man’ –, whose sensitivity distances him irremediably from the crowd. He adopted the radical individualism of Nietzsche not in order to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ this or that schooling model but to exemplify the perpetual clash, inherent in mankind, between the individual and the group, the artist and the non-artistic person, the young and the adult, the son and the father and the self and the world.