The Will to Power (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) »

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Saxony on October 15, 1844. Nietzsche, whose father was a Lutheran pastor, spent a year as a theology student at the University of Bonn, then in 1865, before studying classical philology at the University of Leipzig. Despite poor health and desperate loneliness, Nietzsche managed to produce a book (or a book-length supplement to an earlier publication) every year from 1878 to 1887. In early January 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, confused and incoherent. He spent the last eleven years of his life institutionalized or under the care of his family.

If there are still such things, in this ironic postmodern age, as "dangerous thoughts," surely no book is more overflowing with them than Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power. No other great work of recent literature has heralded the decline of modern Western civilization as emphatically. In The Will to Power many of Nietzsche's fundamental insights are encountered as they first inspired the thinker and as he first wrestled them into words. Moreover, Nietzsche's central theme of nihilism-the uncanny and pervasive feeling that life is devoid of all meaning, purpose, and value-is subjected here to a more thoroughgoing and multifaceted examination than can be found anywhere in his finished writings.