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The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (gė’te). One of the world’s greatest poets; born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, Aug. 28, 1749; died at Weimar, March 22, 1832. Among his early works are the tragedy: ‘Prometheus’ (1773); ‘Erwin and Elmira’ (1774), a comedy; ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’ (1774); ‘Clavigo’ (1774), a tragedy; ‘Stella’ (1775), a drama suggested by Swift’s life. In 1776 he became privy counselor to the reigning Duke of Weimar, and for some years was fully occupied with business of state. His leisure he devoted to composing, in prose, his great tragedy ‘Iphigenia,’ which was recast in verse in 1786; in writing the novel ‘Wilhelm Meister’; and in building up his greatest work, ‘Faust.’ The succession of his works from 1789 forward was: ‘Tasso’ (1789), a drama; ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’ (1790); ‘The Grand Cophta,’ a dramatization of the affair of the Diamond Necklace; ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’ (1796); ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ (1796–97); ‘Elective Affinities’ (1808); ‘Fiction and Truth’ (1811); ‘West-Eastern Divan’ (1814); ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel’ (1821); second part of ‘Faust’ (1831); the first part had appeared as ‘A Fragment’ in 1790. (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).