Goethe's account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis.

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Goethe's Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe's great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this...

In this sequel to Faust, Mephistopheles takes Faust on a journey through ancient Greek mythology, conjuring for him the insurpassably beautiful Helen of Troy, as well as the classical gods. Faust falls in love with and marries Helen, embodying for Goethe his 'imaginative longing to join poetically the Romantic Medievalism of the germanic West to the classical genius of the Greeks'. Further to the themes of redemption and salvation in this great drama, are Goethe's eerie premonitions of modern phenomena such as inflation and the creation of life by scientific synthesis.
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The power and magic of the Faust story, the man who, in a pact with the Devil, trades his soul in return for a period of total knowledge and absolute power, is one of the most potent of all European myths. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) worked on this poetic drama in burst from his twenties until the end of his life. He reshaped the perpetually fascinating legend, probing the nature and process of human striving and questioning the assumed divisins between the forces of good and evil. His Faust has become a landmark in world literature.
Robert David MacDonald's translation of...