Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, philologist, and cultural critic. A prodigy, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at 24. Poor health forced him to resign in 1879, after which he spent a decade wandering between Swiss and Italian boarding houses, writing the works that would make him famous.

"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (1883–1885), "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886), and "On the Genealogy of Morality" (1887) introduced ideas — the will to power, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, the "death of God" — that reshaped philosophy, literature, and psychology. He suffered a mental collapse in Turin in 1889 and spent his last eleven years in the care of his family.

His sister later edited his unpublished notes in ways that distorted his views, a misreading scholars spent much of the 20th century correcting.