Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, the son of a Lutheran pastor, who was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four and resigned ten years later because of ill health. In the decade that followed he wrote the books on which his reputation rests: Human, All Too Human, The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his reason, surviving eleven years in the care of his mother and sister, who edited and distorted his papers after his death.