Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, a tragedy of unbridled emotion, is about the rise of the bourgeois class and of youth culture. Its plot is supposedly based on experiences had by Goethe in his youth and by the life of a friend of his who killed himself. Despite the greater familiarity of English-speaking readers with poets like Samuel Coleridge or John Keats, Goethe (1749–1832) is perhaps the most important figure of the Romantic movement and is generally acknowledged as the greatest writer in the German language. The Sorrows of Young Werther enjoyed unprecedented popularity and helped to establish the modern concepts of the best-seller and the celebrity author. It also, for the first time in literary history, led to a rash of copy-cat suicides. The Sorrows of Young Werther is an example of the late-eighteenth-century German literary movement Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”), which dwelled on uncontrolled feeling in reaction to the...
