Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a brilliant philosophical iconoclast whose devastatingly direct critical writing style might in itself have qualified him as an existentialist. More substantively, though, was how he developed critiques of bourgeois culture, Christianity, empirical reason, and altruistic morality from the standpoint of a protesting individual who was grander, smarter, more creative, and in odd ways for a much later readership, “hipper” than those who championed accepted values of the time. While Dostoyevsky and others had criticized modernity in the hope of a return to more conservative religious values, Nietzsche looked ahead to coming generations, who would use science as an art to transcend the dreariness of Western history.