Description: This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Offering fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all Goethe's major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe's greatest work, Faust, Jeremy Adler also provides many original readings of Goethe's poetry, beginning with the poems written in his early youth. Alongside Goethe's work, Adler analyzes the incidents of his life, including his love affairs and his meetings with the luminaries of his age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Uniquely, Adler also shows how Goethe's encyclopedic interest in literature, science, philosophy, law, and many other fields became important for a wide range of later scientists and thinkers. Among the figures he influenced were Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns--a maker of modernity.
Brief description: Jeremy Adler is professor emeritus of German and a senior research fellow at King's College London. He has published numerous books and writes and reviews regularly for the New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Review Quotes: "An excellent introduction to Goethe. It gives you a view of his life, the contexts of his activity, and the major influences on him. It offers a rich and insightful account of the full spectrum of his literary work. The focus is primarily literary, but not exclusively by any means. There's a wonderful introduction that tells us about Goethe's ongoing influence into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We also get an outline of his biography, since the book is chronologically organized. . . . It is a book that makes clear Goethe's indispensability to our contemporary self-understanding. Moreover, the book is wonderfully written and broadly accessible. It provides translations of all the passages and draws pertinent connections to contemporary culture. So, this is the book to pick up if you want to find out something about Goethe. It's a tremendous achievement. There's nothing more difficult than to take such a complex and rich writer and give us a compelling sense of his contribution."--David E. Wellbery, "The Best Goethe Books" "Five Books"