Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose work attacked the foundations of Christian morality, traditional metaphysics, and the philosophical optimism of his contemporaries. A professor of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four, he resigned his chair due to ill health and spent the next decade writing his most important works — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality — in Swiss and Italian boarding houses. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and spent his final eleven years insane. His ideas have been appropriated and distorted in more ways than almost any thinker in history.
