http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php...
Goethe's Bright Circle
By JAY PARINI

excerpt:

Lately I've been surprisingly elevated by a new life of Goethe, that magnificent fellow at the center of German literature if not German consciousness itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) lived what is commonly called a charmed life. He was born into a relatively wealthy and happy family. His father was an influential lawyer with wonderful connections around Frankfurt am Main. His mother was even more well connected, being the daughter of a former mayor of the city. Goethe lived in a beautiful house, was looked after with a keen eye to his development, and received a solid education. As a young man, he had an unhappy fling with a young woman called Charlotte, but he was not one on whom any experience was wasted. He turned that sad affair to account in a short, brilliant novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which introduced to the literary world the ideal of the Romantic hero (whose unrequited love leads him to suicide). Goethe didn't even bother to change Charlotte's name, although he did shorten it to Lotte. The novel entranced readers, who were attracted to its lyricism, its passionate view of life, and its benign vision of the natural world as the dreamy Werther lay in the grass, delighted in the insects, and thought about the manifold variety of creation.

As John Armstrong's Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) recounts, young Goethe became the most famous writer in Europe at the time, with adoring readers everywhere ready to welcome him. One of those was the bright, powerful, eccentric Duke Karl August von Saxe-Weimar, who took on Goethe as friend and adviser. Goethe remained in the intimate Weimar circle for much of his life, straying only for occasional jaunts to places like Italy, where the high life beckoned. (See his Italian Journey, 1786-1788, one of the finest travel books ever written.)