Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [ a ] 28 August β 22 March was a German polymath , who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary , political , and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther , and joined a thriving intellectual and cultural environment under the patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia that had already included Abel Seyler 's theatre company and Christoph Martin Wieland , and that formed the basis of Weimar Classicism.
Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke's privy council β , sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau , and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena.
He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace. Goethe's first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants , was published after he returned from a tour of Italy. In he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar , and in he began a friendship with the dramatist , historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller , whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship ; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea , and, in , the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, [ 7 ] [ c ] while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name along with Plato , Emanuel Swedenborg , Montaigne , Napoleon , and Shakespeare.
Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann 's Conversations with Goethe Through his maternal grandmother, the renowned German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe belonged to the descendants of the Soldan family and thus had Turkish ancestry.
