Synopses & Reviews
A major work of German romanticism in a translation that is acknowledged as the definitive English language version. The Vintage Classics edition also includes NOVELLA, Goethe's poetic vision of an idyllic pastoral society.
Synopsis
When this book was published in 1774, it inspired a mass cult of feelings (and reputedly a few suicides) and made its author one of the first literary celebrities. It is a story of a tormented young man whose fixation on an inaccessible woman culminates in tragedy may be read as a celebration of unfettered emotion or as a mercilessly accurate portrait of a man whose dedication to pure feeling turns him into a monster.
About the Author
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832) was a novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, and scientist. He wrote
The Sorrows of Young Werther when he was just twenty-four. His enduring dramatic poem "
Faust" took fifty-seven years to write and was published in its entirety only after Goethes death at eighty-three.
BURTON PIKE is professor emeritus of comparative literature at CUNY Graduate Center. A leading critic, scholar, and translator of German literature, he has written and edited books on Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, and many others, and was the editor and co-translator of Musils The Man With-out Qualities.
From the Hardcover edition.