Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Röcken in Prussian Saxony; his father, a Lutheran pastor, died when he was five. He received a rigorous classical education at the famous school of Schulpforta, studied classical philology at Bonn and Leipzig, was overwhelmed by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and became the young friend of the composer Wagner. At twenty-four, before he had even taken his doctorate, he was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel, an extraordinary distinction. Tormented for years by migraine, eye trouble and stomach illness, he resigned his chair at thirty-four and for the next ten years wandered among hotels and rented rooms in Switzerland, Italy and the south of France, writing in solitude books that almost no one read. Early in 1889 he collapsed mentally in a street in Turin and never recovered, spending the last eleven years of his life in the care of his mother and sister.