Book description
The literary career of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spanned less
than twenty years, but no area of intellectual inquiry was left
untouched by his iconoclastic genius. The philosopher who announced the
death of God in The Gay Science (1882) and went on to challenge the
Christian code of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), grappled with
the fundamental issues of the human condition in his own intense
autobiography, Ecce Homo (1888). Most notorious of all, perhaps, his
idea of the triumphantly transgressive bermann ('superman') is
developed in the extreme, yet poetic words of Thus Spake Zarathustra
(1883-92). Whether addressing conventional Western philosophy or
breaking new ground, Nietzsche vastly extended the boundaries of
nineteenth-century thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born near Leipzig in 1844, the son of a
Lutheran clergyman. At 24 he was appointed to the chair of classical
philology at Basle University, where he stayed until forced by his
health to retire in 1879. Here, he wrote all his literature, including
Thus Spake Zarathustra, and developed his idea of the Superman. He
became insane in 1889 and remained so until his death in 1900.
R. J. Hollingdale translated eleven of Nietzsche's books and
published two books about him; he also translated works by, among
others, Schopenhauer, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lichtenberg and
Theodor Fontane, many of these for Penguin Classics. He was the
honorary president of the British Nietzsche Society. R. J. Hollingdale
died on 28 September 2001.
