Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main to a prosperous, cultivated family — his father, Johann Caspar, was an Imperial Councillor with a passion for collecting; his mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor, was the mayor's daughter, sociable and imaginative. He was educated at home by private tutors before studying law at Leipzig in 1765 and Strasbourg in 1770, where an encounter with the architectural grandeur of Strasbourg Cathedral and a friendship with the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder turned him decisively toward literature and the gathering national movement that would become Sturm und Drang. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) — a first-person tragedy of unrequited love and suicide, drawn partly from personal experience and partly from the suicide of a friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem — made him famous across Europe overnight. Napoleon read it seven times. Goethe was twenty-four. In 1775 Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar invited him to court at Weimar, the small that would be his home for the remaining fifty-seven years of his life. He served as a Privy Councillor, directed the ducal theatre, oversaw road-building and mining operations, and pursued what he called his 'second profession': scientific research in morphology, botany (the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790), and optics (Theory of Colours, 1810). Between 1786 and 1788 he slipped away to Italy — Rome, Naples, Sicily — on a journey of self-reinvention that produced the Italian Journey and reshaped his aesthetic toward classical form. The drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787), Egmont (1788), and Torquato Tasso (1790) emerged from this period. Faust, the philosophical drama he had begun as a young man and worked on for six decades, occupied the center of his literary life. Faust Part One appeared in 1808 — the devil Mephistopheles making a wager with God over the soul of an aging scholar — and became the first extended treatment of the Faust legend to give the protagonist genuine philosophical weight. Faust Part Two, finished in August 1831, nine months before his death, was sealed and published posthumously. Goethe died on 22 March 1832 in Weimar, reportedly saying 'More light!' His collected works run to 133 volumes. No other writer in German literature has held his central position for two unbroken centuries.
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Poet · Novelist · Playwright · Author of Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1,749 CE – 1,832 CE
The Frankfurt lawyer's son who became the towering figure of German literature and spent sixty years writing one of Western civilization's foundational texts.
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