The Sorrows of Young Werther (Standard Classics) - Softcover

Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1507799365 ISBN 13: 9781507799369

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

No novel is more often connected to the German STURM UND DRANG (Storm and Stress) literary movement than Goethe’s THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. Written during the author’s early twenties, it is a passionate, tragic story of hopeless love—and is somewhat autobiographical. Its publication immediately assured Goethe’s literary prominence. The novel is also credited as a major influence on the development of the later Romantic movement in the literary arts. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, of course, became one of the most celebrated names in Western literature. Author of four novels, he was also a prolific poet and a dramatist. But the creator of FAUST, PROMETHEUS, and many other great works did not limit his efforts to literature. His studies in botany, human anatomy, and physics established Goethe as one of the leading scientists of his time.

About this title

About the Author:

Goethe's father, Johann Caspar Goethe, lived with his family in a large house in Frankfurt, then an Imperial Free City of the Holy Roman Empire. Though he had studied law in Leipzig and had been appointed Imperial Councillor, he was not involved in the city's official affairs. 38-year-old Johann Caspar married Goethe's mother, Catharina Elizabeth Textor, the daughter of the mayor of Frankfurt Johann Wolfgang Textor and his wife Anna Margaretha Lindheimer, when she was 17 at Frankfurt on 20 August 1748. All their children, except for Goethe and his sister, Cornelia Friederike Christiana, who was born in 1750, died at early ages. His father and private tutors gave Goethe lessons in all the common subjects of their time, especially languages (Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English and Hebrew). Goethe also received lessons in dancing, riding and fencing. Johann Caspar, feeling frustrated in his own ambitions, was determined that his children should have all those advantages that he had not. Goethe had a persistent dislike of the Roman Catholic Church, and characterized its history as a "hotchpotch of fallacy and violence" (Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt). His great passion was drawing. Goethe quickly became interested in literature; Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Homer were among his early favourites. He had a lively devotion to theatre as well and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that were annually arranged in his home; a familiar theme in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. He also took great pleasure in reading from the great works about history and religion. He writes about this period: I had from childhood the singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books, and the divisions of a work, first of the five books of Moses, and then of the 'Aeneid' and Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. . . If an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear witness, led me hither and thither, if the medley of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me, I readily fled to those oriental regions, plunged into the first books of Moses, and there, amid the scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once in the greatest solitude and the greatest society.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1507799365
• ISBN 13: 9781507799369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124
• Editor: Dole Nathen Haskell