Thus Spake Zarathustra is a foundational work of Western literature and is widely considered to be Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It includes the German philosopher’s famous discussion of the phrase ‘God is dead’ as well as his concept of the Superman. Nietzsche delineates his Will to Power theory and devotes pages to critiquing Christian thinking, in particular Christianity’s definition of good and evil.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical novel which deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Übermensch. The book talks about the old wise man who descends from his mountain among the people, out of a desire to learn something from them and to donate his wisdom to people. He encounters a variety of people and learns their secrets and reveals that he is actually looking for a man equal to himself. Many do not understand his philosophy and ridicule him, but there are those who admire him. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Before turning to philosophy, he began his career as a classical philologist and worked at the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but he had to retire due to health problems. Nietzsche's body of writing spanned philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction, and drew widely on art, philology, history, religion, and science. His writing displayed a fondness for aphorism and irony, while engaging with a wide range of subjects including morality, aesthetics, tragedy, epistemology, atheism, and consciousness. Along with Soren Kierkegaard he is considered to be one of the founders of existentialism.

The Friedrich Nietzsche Collection

The works of Friedrich Nietzsche have fascinated readers around the world ever since the publication of his first book more than a hundred years ago. As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world’s leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, “Few writers in any age were so full of ideas,” and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted. The Portable Nietzsche includes Kaufmann’s definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche’s four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche’s development, versatility, and inexhaustibility. “In this volume, one may very conveniently have a rich review of one of the most sensitive, passionate, and misunderstood writers in Western, or any, literature.” —Newsweek

Nietzsche's infamous work Thus Spake Zarathustra is filled with a strange sense of religiosity that seems to run counter to the philosopher's usual polemics against religious faith. For some scholars, this book marks little but a mental decline in the great philosopher; for C. G. Jung, Zarathustra was an invaluable demonstration of the unconscious at work, one that illuminated both Nietzsche's psychology and spirituality and that of the modern world in general. The original two-volume edition of Jung's lively seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra has been an important source for specialists in depth psychology. This new abridged paperback edition allows interested readers to participate with Jung as he probes the underlying meaning of Nietzsche's great work.