Ľudovít Štúr (Uhrovec 1815 – Modra 1856) was born as the son of the Lutheran teacher Samuel Štúr, was schooled in Győr and at the Protestant Lyceum in Pressburg/Bratislava (known as Prešporok na Dunaji to the Slovak Romantics), and studied theology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Halle.  At the Evangelical Lyceum, first as a student and then as a young teacher assisting Juraj Palkovič, his organizing talent and leadership galvanized his fellow-students and Slovak patriots at the institution (among them Michal Miloslav Hodža and Jozef Miloslav Hurban), who had established the Spoločnost česko-slovanská. Influenced by Kollár’s ideas of inter-Slavic solidarity and “reciprocity”, he aimed, in addition to literary exchanges, to establish direct contacts, and to stimulate the study of Slavic antiquity as well as contemporary literary production.  His peers took a public stance under the name Mladé Slovensko (in obvious allusion to the various “Young” European movements of the time); in that capacity, Štúr published, together with Ctiboh Zoch, the almanac Plody (1836) and prepared a collection of odes on important personalities in the Slavic world: City vděčnosti (it remained unpublished until 1959). His lectures on Slavic history, poetry, and folk songs articulated a literary Slovak and Slavic canon of the Romantic period. Štúr and his followers – the “Štúr generation” or štúrovci – undertook hikes and rambles in the countryside, climbed local mountain peaks in a symbolic gesture (most famously the ascent of Kriváň in 1841), and visited historical castles and historically resonant sites. In 1836, at Devín Castle, Štúr took the name “Velislav”, at an event that he organized as a “Slavic baptism” of patriots. He signed his texts with many pseudonyms underlining his Slavic origin (“Brat Sloven”, “Slovák”, “Ein ungarischer Slave”), and through all these activities created a symbolical bond between cultural commitment and the culture’s territory. That territory, as yet inchoate, was indicated by the phrase “Between the Danube and the Tatras”.

Štúr also initiated the building of a library, ordering or procuring newspapers and publications, through contacts with like-minded spirits from Prague, Brno, Vienna, Lvov, Zagreb, Pest, Bautzen, and elsewhere. He attempted to establish (on a German model) a book-distribution centre in Bratislava in cooperation with the Czech publisher Jaroslav Pospíšil, using students as couriers for this book exchange. In addition, a travel association, Spoločnost česko-slovanská, was established to collect ethnographic material and folk tales, which were then processed and published. He himself wrote the travelogue Na ceste po krajoch Lužických Srbov (1839), in which he encouraged the Lusatian Sorbs to revitalize their national life. His worry that Slavic culture was marginalized and discouraged in the Habsburg Empire led to the denunciations Die Entnationalisierung der Slaven (1841) and Der Sprachenkampf in Ungarn (1843). His  Die Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn (1843) appeared anonymously in Leipzig.

In 1843-44, Štúr, Hodža, and Hurban established the Tatrín association, with the aim of forming a Slovak literary language which would be acceptable regardless of regional or confessional distinctions. It published a newspaper, Slovenské národné noviny (1845-48), and its agenda was laid out in Štúr’s Nárečja Slovenskuo alebo potreba pisanja v tomto nárečí (1846). The twenty years that Štúr spent in Bratislava as a student, teacher, journalist, poet, public activist, organizer, and politician (1829-48) represented the most active period of his life.

In October 1847 Štúr became a member of the Hungarian Parliament (snem), where his activities took a more directly political turn. After the outbreak of the revolution in March 1848 Štúr was, with Hurban and Hodža, among the initiators of the Žiadostí slovenského národa, a list of Slovak political requests, published as a manifesto in Liptovský Sv. Mikuláš in May 1848. This move was considered disloyal by the Hungarian leadership, and an arrest warrant was issued for Štúr, Hurban, and Hodža. Having eluded arrest, the three were among the convenors of the 1848 Slavic Congress in Prague. After its break-up Štúr withdrew from Prague to Zagreb, then to Vienna, where he organized the Slovenská národna rada, which, in order to gain political concessions, took active service for the imperial authorities against the Hungarian insurgents.

After the revolution Štúr withdrew from public life. Without employment or income except from private German lessons, he lived with his relatives, first in Uhrovec, then in Modra. In 1853 he published his collected poems, Spevy a piesne, and the Slovak folk song collection O národních písních a pověstech plemen slovanských. He died in January 1856 from injuries incurred in a hunting accident. His funeral was one of the most spectacular national celebrations that the Slovak nationalist community organized in the second half of the 19th century.