Friedrich
Nietzsche
1844 — 1900
The pastor's son who declared God dead, wrote for readers not yet born, and lost his mind before they arrived.
His father died of a brain disease when he was four. He read Schopenhauer in a fortnight, was made a professor at twenty-four without a doctorate, worshipped Wagner and broke with him, and was driven from Basel by headaches and failing eyes. For ten years he lived in boarding-houses between the Engadin and the Riviera, walking eight hours a day and writing the books that no one bought. He collapsed in a Turin street in January 1889 and spent eleven years in silence while his sister built an archive around him.
She edited his notebooks into a book he never wrote, and later gave Hitler his walking stick. He has things to say about that.