Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was famous across Europe at twenty-five for The Sorrows of Young Werther, spent the rest of his life as a minister and then ornament of the small court of Weimar, and wrote in every form: lyric, drama, novel, epic, autobiography, and treatises on colour and plant morphology. Faust, begun in his twenties and finished months before his death at eighty-two, is the German national poem. Egmont is the play Beethoven scored, Hermann and Dorothea the idyll of the Revolution’s refugees, and Poetry and Truth the account of how he became himself.