Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German poet, novelist, playwright, statesman and natural philosopher, and the central figure of German literature. He rose to fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the defining novel of the Sturm und Drang movement, and later, alongside Friedrich Schiller, led the turn toward Weimar Classicism from the city of Weimar, where he also served for decades as a government minister to Duke Carl August. His novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96), tracing a young man's moral and artistic education through a series of formative experiences, gave literary scholarship its model for the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, a term the critic Karl Morgenstern coined in 1819 with Goethe's novel as the exemplary case. His two-part drama Faust, begun in his twenties and completed only in the year of his death, is generally regarded as his masterwork. Goethe was also a working scientist, publishing Theory of Colours (1810) in direct opposition to Newton's optics and conducting influential botanical work on plant morphology.