From the preface: "BIOGRAPHIES are the life of history. Great men are the chief elements of a nation's power and renown. Plutarch's "Lives" furnish the best account extant of the old Greeks and Romans. He who has mastered the biographies of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, knows the chief parts of American history. When Thomas Carlyle had completed his "Elucidation of Oliver Cromwell" he wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I wish you would take an America hero and give us a history of him." The settlement and growth of the territory...

Nietzsche, the Thinker is a classic overview of the famous philosopher.