In 1772, we find the young German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe flunking out of law school and getting drunk with his friends. He’s a free spirit trapped in a stringent world where class is everything.

IN reading Grimm’s Life and Times of Goethe 1 we have wondered anew at that defect of the great man’s nature which renders him, to us, an almost incomprehensible, half-human being, — we mean the ...

LIBRARIES of commentary in every European language have grown up around the unsolved enigma, What is Faust? and still we seem in need of some more definite solution of the problem. Learned and ...

AGENERAL eagerness to wring some usable wisdom from Goethe, preferably in condensed form, on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth has pushed the great man from the company of the poets into the ...

That Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest poet Germany ever produced, was at one time interested in the Yiddish language is not commonly known. This is of peculiar interest in the light of the ...

A review of Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated by Allan Blunden. The grown man would “harvest” the ideas that Goethe let fall in his last decade. An aspiring poet, ...

Poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, scholar, lawyer, theatre director, and critic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer ...

I like to read biographies at bedtime, especially ones that lift me up for a brief while, so I can float away to sleep. Lives full of energy and pleasant occasions usually do the trick, although they ...