Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, poet, and scholar best known for his criticisms of religion, morality, and contemporary culture, as well as his theories on perspectivism and eternal recurrence. His work greatly influenced modern Western philosophical thought, and he is credited with nearly twenty published philosophical works, among them Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Antichrist. Despite being plagued with a neurological condition that forced him into an early retirement from teaching in 1879, Nietzsche completed his primary body of work over the following ten years before suffering a complete mental breakdown in 1889. He died in 1900 at the age of fifty-five.
German-born British writer and translator Helen Zimmern (1846–1934) played a pivotal role in making German and Italian literature accessible to English-speaking audiences. She began her career writing short stories for publications such as the English literary magazine Once a Week and the American pulp magazine Argosy, as well as penning several collections of children’s stories, before moving on to literary criticism and translation. After befriending philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Switzerland, she went on to translate three of his books: Beyond Good and Evil, Human, and All Too Human.
