Friedrich Nietzsche

Was made a professor of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four, before finishing his doctorate, and resigned ten years later in poor health.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals came in a decade of extraordinary productivity while he was largely unread, moving between boarding houses in Italy and Switzerland with migraines and failing eyesight.

The arguments people think they know are usually the ones he did not make. God is dead is a diagnosis of what Europe had done, not a boast. The will to power is not a licence for cruelty. The Übermensch is not a race.

He collapsed in Turin in 1889, reportedly after seeing a horse being whipped, and spent his last eleven years incapacitated. His sister Elisabeth, whose hatred of Jews he had attacked in writing, took control of the manuscripts, assembled The Will to Power from his notes and handed the archive to the movement that later claimed him. Undoing that has taken scholars most of a century.