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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent his entire life in Königsberg, a small German town on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. (After World War II, Germany's border was pushed west, so Königsberg is now called Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.) At the age of fifty-five, Kant had published much work on the natural sciences, taught at Königsberg University for over twenty years, and achieved a good reputation in German literary circles.
During the last twenty-five years of his life, however, Kant's philosophical work placed him firmly in the company of such towering giants as Plato and Aristotle. Kant's three major works are often considered to be the starting points for different branches of modern philosophy: Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for the philosophy of mind; Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for moral philosophy; and Critique of Judgment (1790) for aesthetics, the philosophy of art. Kant continued to think and write well into his old age, and he was at work on a fourth Critique at the time of his death in 1804.
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals was published in 1785, three years before Critique of Practical Reason. It is essentially a short introduction to the argument presented in the second Critique. To better understand what Kant is up to in this book, it is useful to know something about Kant's other works and about the intellectual climate of his time. You can read more about these topics in the essay Historical Context: Kant and Enlightenment Era Thought.
