Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and classical philologist. He became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869 and retired in 1879 because of ill health. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), traced Greek tragedy to the interplay of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. His later works examined morality, religion and the creation of values; Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), a philosophical prose poem in four parts, has its prophet teach the overhuman and the eternal return; Beyond Good and Evil (1886) takes apart the assumptions behind philosophy, religion and morality in nine parts of aphorisms and a closing poem. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) traces the origins of good and evil, and of guilt and bad conscience, to the history of values. In 1888 he wrote Ecce Homo, an account of his life and books, which was first published in 1908, after his death in 1900.