Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German writer, statesman and natural scientist whose enormous body of work across poetry, drama, the novel and scientific writing made him the central figure of German literature and a major influence on European Romanticism. His early epistolary novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774) became a continent-wide literary sensation that helped launch the German Sturm und Drang movement, and his two-part drama "Faust," on which he worked for most of his adult life, is widely considered the greatest work of German literature. Beyond literature, Goethe served for decades as a government minister in the Duchy of Weimar and conducted serious scientific research in botany, anatomy and optics, including a theory of color that challenged Newtonian optics, leading later commentators to regard him as one of the last true polymaths of European culture.