Anthony was a young Copt of comfortable means when he heard read in church the command to sell all and follow. He did exactly that, and went out to live alone at the edge of the desert, and then deeper into it — twenty years in an abandoned fort, and later a mountain near the Red Sea.
He did not intend to found anything. But others followed him out, and the loose settlements of hermits that gathered around him became the beginning of Christian monasticism, which reshaped the Church in both East and West. Athanasius wrote his Life shortly after his death, and it became one of the most widely read books in the ancient world — Augustine names it as part of what turned him.