Complete Plays, Lenz, and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)

Collected in this volume are powerful dramas and psychological fiction by the nineteenth-century iconoclast now recognized as a major figure of world literature. Also included are selections from Büchner's letters and philosophical writings.

When he died in 1837, just as Woyzeck (later turned into an opera by modernist Allan Berg) was nearing completion, Georg Büchner was not yet twenty-four years old. It would be almost 60 years before the first of Büchner's plays Leonce and Lena was performed before a German audience--and almost 100 years before his plays were translated into English. His plays have have grown more important and more relevant with the passage of time. Today, he is considered a forerunner of both naturalism and expressionism.