An early vocation
The young classical scholar
Nietzsche became a professor of classical philology unusually young, then moved beyond academic convention toward philosophy written in a more personal voice.Nietzsche grew up in a Protestant household after the early death of his father and trained as a classical philologist. At twenty-four he received a professorship at Basel before completing the conventional academic path. The speed of that ascent matters because his later departure from the university was not the rejection of a life he had failed to enter; it was the loss of an identity in which he had already been unusually successful.