Thus Spake Zarathustra

After ten years alone on a mountain, the prophet Zarathustra comes down to share what he has learned and finds the people laughing at him. In a series of parables, songs and speeches, Nietzsche has him announce the death of God, the coming of the Übermensch who will create new values, and the dizzying thought of eternal recurrence, the idea that every moment of life will return forever.

Written between 1883 and 1885 in a deliberately biblical style, it is Nietzsche's most poetic book and the one he valued most. Richard Strauss turned it into a tone poem whose opening became famous in the film 2001. Read it slowly, a few chapters at a time, as you would read poetry.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.