German poet, novelist, playwright, natural philosopher, and statesman — the commanding figure of German literature and one of the last European writers to whom the idea of universal culture (Weltliteratur, a term he coined) was not an ironic aspiration. Goethe's range is without real parallel in modern letters: lyric poet, author of the runaway 1774 sorrows-of-young-Werther sensation that set off an epidemic of suicides across Europe, of the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister, of scientific works on color and plant morphology, and across more than sixty years of two Faust dramas that he treated as the vessel of his life's thought.
Faust — Part One (1808) the Gretchen tragedy every German schoolchild encounters; Part Two (pub. 1832) a cosmic allegory of human striving, economic modernization, and classical-romantic synthesis that most readers never finish — is the great ambiguous monument of German literature. The scholar who sells his soul to Mephistopheles, seduces and destroys an innocent girl, and is in the end redeemed because he has striven, is Goethe's final word on the moral ambiguities of the modern self.
He served for decades as minister in the small court of Weimar under Duke Karl August, making Weimar the center of German letters. His friendship with Schiller produced the "Weimar Classicism" against whose measured classical ideal the early Romantics (and the later Nietzsche) both defined themselves. Emerson, Carlyle, and Mann took him as the exemplary modern European. The German word Goethezeit — "the age of Goethe" — treats him as a whole period in the life of the language.