The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther ([ˈveːɐ̯tɐ]; German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), or simply Werther, is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.

The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life, and involving triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff (who married Kestner); and the other involved Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche (who married Brentano), and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem died by suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772. He shot himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Kestner. These events are fictionalized to describe the emotional tumult of the titular character Werther, who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.

The novel was adapted as the opera Werther by Jules Massenet in 1892.