Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a professor of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four, resigned through ill health ten years later, and wrote his major books in a decade of wandering between Swiss and Italian boarding houses before collapsing in Turin in 1889 and spending his last eleven years insane. Thus Spoke Zarathustra announced the death of God and the overman; Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals traced morality to its origins in resentment and power. His sister edited The Will to Power from his notebooks. He is the philosopher the twentieth century could not stop arguing with.