J.W. von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German poet, novelist, playwright, scientist, and statesman. Born in Frankfurt am Main, he studied law in Leipzig and Strasbourg before settling in Weimar, where he served at the ducal court of Karl August for the greater part of his life and where he died at the age of eighty-two. His output — spanning more than six decades — includes lyric poetry, drama, prose fiction, memoir, scientific writing, and literary criticism.

The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) established his European reputation and became one of the most widely read novels of the Romantic period. He devoted decades to Faust, a two-part dramatic poem of which Part I appeared in 1808 and Part II, completed in 1831, was published posthumously; the work is among the most ambitious projects in the history of German literature. The Wilhelm Meister novels (Apprenticeship, 1795–96; Journeys, 1821–29) developed the Bildungsroman as a form for examining the education of the individual through experience. His scientific work, particularly the Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810), which proposed a phenomenological account of color perception in opposition to Newton's optics, attracted sustained attention from painters — among them Turner — and from philosophers including Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. His Italian Journey (published 1816–17; travel 1786–88) records the decisive formative experience of his life and is a key document of the relationship between German culture and antiquity.

He was a minister and Privy Councillor in Weimar and received honors from courts and academies across Europe. His conversations were recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann (Conversations with Goethe, 1836–48). His writing — and Faust above all — has remained a point of reference for writers, composers, and artists from Berlioz and Delacroix to Thomas Mann.