The Sorrows of Young Werther - Vintage Classics by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Paperback

Book Synopsis

The story of a young man driven to suicide by an unhappy love affair, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" is the first great tragic novel of Eurpean literature.

From the Back Cover

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 Goethe's death at eighty-three.