Walter Kaufmann was one of the leading authorities on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Many scholars consider his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) the most profound interpretation of the German thinker ever written; the historian of ideas Peter Gay says of it in his introduction to the 2000 edition of Kaufmann's Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1968) that "in the course of the twentieth century no American academic study has had a wider, and more fully deserved, impact." Kaufmann also translated many of Nietzsche's works, and his The Portable Nietzsche (1954) had the largest sales of any of the volumes in the Portable Viking series. His 1961 translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808, 1832) and his 1970 translation of Martin Buber's Ich und Du (1923) as I and Thou are widely considered to be unexcelled. In addition to Nietzsche, Kaufmann wrote extensively on the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and introduced English-speaking readers to...