Happiness is not an idea normally associated with Nietzsche. His biographers unsurprisingly concentrate on the unhappiness that defined much of his adult life (Chamberlain 1997). A powerful sense of isolation and loneliness pervades the notes he put together in 1873 on Oedipus and the soliloquies of ‘the last philosopher’ (Nietzsche 1987). In the Wanderer and his Shadow from 1880 that eventually appeared in Human, All Too Human, he laments ‘One is filled with autumnal melancholy to think of the greatness as well as the transitoriness of human happiness’ (Nietzsche 1996: §271). The theme of happiness rarely appears in the secondary literature on Nietzsche. There are however three important exceptions: Walter Kaufmann (1974 [1950]), McMahon (2006) and Richard Schacht (1983).