Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe trained as a lawyer in Strasbourg and Leipzig, then abandoned the courtroom for the pen after The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel about a young man's suicidal infatuation, made him famous across Europe within months and reportedly triggered a wave of copycat deaths. He was twenty-four.

At Weimar he became a duke's minister, running mines and theaters and roads for a decade before fleeing to Italy to rediscover himself as a writer. He returned to poetry, botany, optics, and a rivalrous friendship with Schiller, and spent the rest of his life circling Faust, the drama of a man who trades his soul for total knowledge. He finished its second part in 1831, months before he died at eighty-two.