Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is widely recognized as the greatest writer of the German tradition. The Romantic period in Germany (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) is known as the Age of Goethe, and Goethe embodies the concerns of the generation defined by the legacies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and the French Revolution. His stature derives not only from his literary achievements as a lyric poet, novelist, and dramatist but also from his often significant contributions as a scientist (geologist, botanist, anatomist, physicist, historian of science) and as a critic and theorist of literature and of art. He was, finally, such an imposing personality that for the last thirty years of his life he was Germany's greatest cultural monument, serving as an object of pilgrimage from all over Europe and even from the United States and leaving the small town of Weimar a major cultural center...