Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a master of the novel, drama, and lyric poetry before the age of thirty. His greatest achievement was his refusal to settle into a single style, consistently reinventing literary forms.

Born in 1749 in Frankfurt to a prosperous family, Goethe studied law in Strasbourg. There, he encountered the poet-philosopher Herder, discovered Shakespeare, and began writing poetry. His play Götz von Berlichingen (1773) brought him fame across Germany, leading to an invitation to the court of the duke of Sachsen-Weimar, where he soon became a cabinet minister. In 1774, his novel of Romantic melancholy, The Sorrows of Young Werther, captivated Europe. Around this time, he began working on the first version of his epic Faust, which was published as a fragment in 1790.

During the 1780s, Goethe traveled to England and engaged deeply with classical poetry. The following decade saw the publication of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a novel about a young artist’s education, alongside a prolific output of poetry and criticism. He returned to Faust around the turn of the century, completing Part 1 in 1808.

Goethe’s later years were dedicated to diverse interests, including botanical research, a theory of colors, the novel Elective Affinities, the lyrical West-Eastern Divan, and his autobiography, Poetry and Truth. In his eighties, he oversaw a forty-volume collection of his works. The forty-first volume, published posthumously in 1832, was the second part of Faust.

Goethe’s expansive intellect resisted confinement to a single form or philosophy. When asked about the theme of his magnum opus, Faust, he famously stated it encompassed “From heaven through all the world to hell,” reflecting the vast scope of his subject matter.

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