One of the towering figures of world literature, Goethe has never held quite as prominent a place in the English-speaking world as he deserves.
In the 1780s Goethe visited England and immersed.
Soon as he was at work on the first version of his Faust, which would finally appear as a fragment in 1790.
In 1774 his novel of Romantic melancholy, The Sorrows of a Young Werther, electrified all of Europe.
He was invited to the court of the duke of Sachsen-Weimar, where he quickly became a cabinet minister.
His play G tz von Berlichingen (1773) made him famous throughout Germany.
There, he met the poet-philosopher Herder, discovered Shakespeare, and began to write poetry.
Born in 1749 to a well-to-do family in Frankfurt, he was sent to Strasbourg to earn a law degree.
But even more impressive than his versatility was his unwillingness ever to settle into a single style or approach; whenever he used a literary form, he made of it something new.
Auden, Louise Bogan, David Constantine, Barker Fairley, and Elizabeth Mayer (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) About the Author: Before he was thirty, Goethe had proven himself a master of the novel, the drama, and lyric poetry.
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The cosmic drama of Faust goes far beyond the realism of the novels in a poetic exploration of good and evil, while Italian Journey, written in the author\'s old age, recalls his youth in Italy and the impact of Mediterranean culture on a young northerner.
Its exploration of the conflicts between ideas and feelings, between circumstance and desire, continues in his controversial novel probing the institution of marriage, Elective Affinities.
The Sorrows of Young Werther is a story of self-destructive love that made its author a celebrity overnight at the age of twenty-five.
This collection of his four major works, together with a selection of his finest letters and poems, shows that he is not only one of the very greatest European writers: he is also accessible, entertaining, and contemporary.
One of the towering figures of world literature, Goethe has never held quite as prominent a place in the English-speaking world as he deserves
