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The aim of the present work is to give a coherent and self-contained account of the most significant results obtained over the past decade concerning the existence problem for strongly nonlinear evolution equations, with the main emphasis on applications to partial differential equations. All the results included here have never been collected into a single monograph, mainly because most of them are very recent. The sole exception is Chapter 1, which has an introductory character. Indeed, the first result in the spirit of this book is that of \textit{A. Pazy} [Isr. J. Math. 20, 23-36 (1975; Zbl 0305.47022)] which was the starting point for several subsequent developments of the general existence theory. From the very beginning I would like to point out that this work is not exhaustive. In selecting the material I confined myself to only those results referring to nonlinear evolution equations governed by `nonaccretive' perturbations of m-accretive operators, including several classes of so-called ill-posed problems. In addition, the main criterion in including the abstract results is that of their applicability. Keeping in mind that the theory of nonlinear evolution equations is mainly motivated by concrete problems coming either from inside or, more frequently, from outside mathematics, the reader will easily understand my bias in favour of the applications. As a consequence, I have tried, as much as possible, to illustrate each abstract result by illuminating examples. Thus, I have treated in detail several very recent or new results relating to nonlinear partial differential equations describing: nonlinear diffusion; the propagation of forced waves; heat conduction in a material with memory; and the vibrations of a string with memory. New existence results concerning reaction-diffusion systems and closed loop systems are also included. The book is divided into five chapters and a final section entitled `Bibliographical notes, comments and open problems'. Chapter 1 contains the basic background needed for a good understanding of the whole book. Since almost all the results herein are by now classical, no proofs are given. Instead, references to several textbooks and monographs where the corresponding proofs can be found are inserted. In Chapter 2 we prove the main compactness results which are widely used throughout the book. If the reading of Chapter 1 is not necessary for someone with a good training in the theory of nonlinear evolution equations governed by m-accretive operators, this is not the case with Chapter 2, which plays a central role. However, after reading Chapter 2 one may pass directly to Chapter 5 or to Chapter 4 in as much as the concatenation of the results is not sequential. In Chapter 3 we prove the main existence results concerning nonlinear evolution equations governed either by multivalued or by single-valued perturbations of m-accretive operators. Chapter 4 is mainly devoted to the study of the same problem for the specific case in which the m-accretive operator involved is a subdifferential \(\partial \phi\). Due to the regularizing effect of \(\partial \phi\), here the perturbing term is allowed to be discontinuous and defined merely on D(\(\partial \phi)\). Therefore, the existence results in this chapter apply to broad classes of nonlinear partial differential equations including the well known Navier-Stokes equations. In Chapter 5 we prove several existence results referring to some nonlinear Volterra integrodifferential equations and functional differential equations. The main purpose of the final section of the book is to provide the reader with proper references and historical comments, to analyze some collateral results not included in the main text, and at the same time to call attention to some open problems.