The Sorrows of Young Werther

Werther, a sensitive young man, spends a summer in a country town and falls hopelessly in love with Lotte, who is engaged to the sensible, decent Albert. His letters to a friend tell of happiness in nature, children and poetry, then of jealousy, humiliation and despair, until he borrows Albert's pistols.

Published in 1774, when Goethe was twenty-four, the novel made him famous across Europe overnight. Young men dressed like Werther in blue coats and yellow waistcoats, and Napoleon said he had read it seven times. It is short, intense and still the classic portrait of a love that consumes a whole life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was born in Frankfurt and trained as a lawyer, but at twenty-four his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made him famous across Europe. Invited to the small court of Weimar, he served as a minister for years while writing poems, plays and novels, and pursuing serious research in botany, anatomy and the theory of colour.

His friendship with the poet Schiller and his journey to Italy shaped German classicism, and his Faust, the work of sixty years, is the summit of German literature. Goethe admired the Persian poet Hafez and the Quran, and his West-Eastern Divan was an early bridge between European and Islamic poetry.