JOHN ARMSTRONG knows he has an uphill battle in making a case for his subject, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The author even begins his book, “Love, Life, Goethe,” with the Dublin building-site joke he ...

THE consciousness that biography is a particular and a difficult art is borne in upon us when we stop to consider how few, how very few, of our really heroic figures have been set before us in ...

Bielschowsky gave ear to Goethe in his remark to Meyer, “All the officious considerations of biographers are of little value when compared with the naïve details of a great life,” and following this ...

In 1772, we find the young German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe flunking out of law school and getting drunk with his friends. He’s a free spirit trapped in a stringent world where class is everything.

A University of Chicago scholar who is one of the world’s foremost experts in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has been honored with an award named for the renowned German intellectual. Prof. David E.

In the autumn of 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe went to war against France in the service of a coalition of German armies. The war aimed to protect the monarchs of old Europe from the menace of the ...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), most commonly known in the English-speaking world as “the German Shakespeare,” lived large. At 25 his novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” made him into a ...

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann ...

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a four-part Aspen Journalism series on Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s visit to Aspen, where he gave the keynote address at the Goethe Bicentennial of 1949 and ...