Frederich Nietzsche was born in Leipzig in 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. At the age of twenty-four he became the chair of classical philology at Basel University until his bad health forced him to retire in 1879. He divorced himself from society until his final collapse in 1899 when he became insane. He died in 1900. M. Tanner is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge. R.J. Hollingdale has translated eleven of Nietzsche's books and published two books about him.