SOURCE: "The First German Faust Published in America," in American Notes & Queries, Vol. X, No. 8, April, 1972, pp. 115-6.

In the following essay, Stern discusses the original publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust in America during the nineteenth-cenitury Transcendenitalist literary movement. Stern also comments on the resonance of the Faust myth in the American mind.

The importance of Goethe in the cultural life of 19th-century America has been so well documented that any further evidence may seem superfluous and all but impossible. Yet a footnote, in the form of a previously underestimated "first", may now be added to the towering superstructure of the bibliography on the subject.

From the time of Edward Everett's return from abroad in 1819, the fame of German literature and philosophy began to spread in this country. The foreign seeds were sowed here by Margaret Fuller, Emerson and others. Carlyle's influence was effective and in...