"Of all major writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe offers his biographers the most promising chance to unite the life of the artist with the spirit of his time. They have insisted on the idea of the Goethezeit (Age of Goethe), to describe the period from 1770, when Goethe published his first collection of poems, to 1830, when he was completing his frantic, hallucinatory tragedy, "Faust," and the last volume of his stately autobiography, "Poetry and Truth.""
"They have insisted on the idea of the Goethezeit (Age of Goethe), to describe the period from 1770, when Goethe published his first collection of poems, to 1830, when he was completing his frantic, hallucinatory tragedy, "Faust," and the last volume of his stately autobiography, "Poetry and Truth." In those sixty years, he published three of the most significant novels in the history of literature ("The Sorrows of Young Werther," "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," "Elective Affinities"), dramas, epics, elegies, lyric poems, and treatises on geology, morphology,"
Biographical work must connect private passions and follies to original art while showing that art registers political and cultural upheavals. Successful biographies synchronize personal episodes—family conflict, lovers, social change, illness—with creative production to form a coherent arc that embodies an era. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exemplifies such synthesis through extraordinary output across 1770–1830, including major novels, dramas, lyric poems, and scientific treatises. The Goethezeit marks a period in which Goethe produced seminal novels like The Sorrows of Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister, completed Faust, and pursued studies in geology, morphology, and color, reflecting an expansive life inquiry.
Read at The New Yorker
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