German poet, dramatist, novelist, translator, scientist, and musician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was the last universal genius of the West and a master of world literature, the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust. Nowhere else can one encounter a more penetrating, many-sided, and personal Goethe than in the extraordinary Conversations (1836) by Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854), a German author and scholar as well as Goethe's friend, archivist, and editor. Although only thirty-one when first meeting the seventy-four-year-old...