Short answers, pulled from the story.
Walter Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet who lived from the 1st of July 1921 to the 4th of September 1980. Born in Freiburg im Breisgau, he emigrated to the United States in 1939 and served for more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University. He is best known for his translations and scholarly interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Kaufmann is renowned for his translations and exegesis of Nietzsche, whom he argued was gravely misunderstood by English-speaking readers. His 1950 book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist positioned Nietzsche as a major early existentialist and an unexpected precursor to analytic philosophy. He also translated Goethe's Faust, Martin Buber's I and Thou, and edited influential anthologies including Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.
At age eleven, Kaufmann concluded that he believed neither in the Trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus, which led him to leave Lutheranism and convert to Judaism. He later discovered that all four of his grandparents were Jewish. Being both a convert and of Jewish descent placed him in real danger in Nazi Germany, and he emigrated to the United States in 1939.
In his 1961 book The Faith of a Heretic, Kaufmann proposed four cardinal virtues: humbition (a fusion of humility and ambition), love, courage, and honesty. The coinage humbition expressed his view that genuine humility and genuine ambition were necessary partners rather than opposites.
Kaufmann admired Kierkegaard's passion and his insights on freedom, anxiety, and individualism, writing that nobody before Kierkegaard had seen so clearly that the freedom to make a fateful decision breeds anxiety. He edited the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. He was critical of Kierkegaard's Protestant theology and disliked Heidegger's thinking, while writing extensively on Karl Jaspers as well.
Kaufmann joined the Philosophy Department at Princeton University in 1947 and remained based there for the rest of his career, a tenure of more than 30 years. His students included Nietzsche scholars Frithjof Bergmann, Richard Schacht, Ivan Soll, and Alexander Nehamas.