I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

The Definitive Modern Biography

Sue Prideaux's I Am Dynamite!, published in 2018, is widely regarded as the best single-volume biography of Friedrich Nietzsche available in English. Prideaux, a British biographer who previously wrote on Edvard Munch, brings a novelist's eye to Nietzsche's life. The book covers everything: the overbearing mother, the pietistic upbringing, the early brilliance at Basel, the friendship and rupture with Wagner, the doomed infatuation with Lou Salome, the decades of solitary wandering through Swiss and Italian boarding houses, the collapse in Turin in 1889, and the eleven silent years before his death in 1900.

Why This Biography Stands Out

Most Nietzsche biographies are written by philosophers for philosophers, and they subordinate the life to the ideas. Prideaux does the opposite. She writes the life as a life, with the philosophical works emerging naturally from the circumstances that produced them. The result is a book that non-specialists can read with pleasure. She is particularly good on Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, the sister who systematically distorted her brother's legacy after his collapse, forging letters and editing manuscripts to align his work with German nationalism. The book won the Hawthornden Prize. Crown Publishing paperback.

About This Edition

Author: Sue Prideaux
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Format: Paperback