German · b. 1749
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, poet, and statesman widely regarded as the greatest figure in German literature, author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a colossus of German and world literature — poet, dramatist, novelist, scientist, and statesman — whose work spanned and shaped the Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romantic movements.
His early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) made him famous across Europe, while his masterpiece, the two-part dramatic poem Faust, occupied him for much of his life and stands among the supreme achievements of Western literature. He also wrote influential novels, lyric poetry, and works of natural science.
Goethe is revered as the central figure of German letters and one of the great universal geniuses of the modern age.
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther, a young man of sensitivity and artistic feeling, falls in love with Charlotte, who is engaged and then married to another. His inability to either act on his love or let it go leads to his suicide. Written in epistolary form by the twenty-four-year-old Goethe, the novel triggered a wave of imitative suicides across Europe.
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