Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of the most remarkable and influential books of the nineteenth century.

It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead—and that the Superman—the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor.

Brilliantly original, it confirmed Nietzsche’s position as the towering European philosopher of his age.

With blazing intensity and brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but rather in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.

Later, to the detriment of mankind, Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', and his doctrine of the Superman were seized upon and twisted by, among others, Adolph Hitler and his Nazis to terrible effect.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Nietzsche's body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew early inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Goethe. A powerfully original thinker, Nietzsche's influence on successive writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre, was significant.