Nietzsche was convinced that with Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Book One (Also Sprach Zarathustra), a prose poem he divined in ten days of feverish exhilaration in January 1883, he had finally realized the masterwork that would command an audience. In a letter enclosed with the manuscript, he assured his Leipzig publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, that “my little work—not even a hundred pages” is “far and away the most serious and also the gayest of my products, and accessible to everyone,” trying to convince him that this book would surely have the broad appeal that had eluded his earlier works. More to
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