A.N. Wilson is a noted and prize winning biographer with studies of Tolstoy Dickens Milton
and C.S. Lewis to his credit among others. Here he turns his outstanding gifts to a study of
the life and thought of Goethe - poet dramatist politician. Goethe's life touched every
aspect of what made the world become modern. And the great poetic drama of Faust is in essence
the story of this. Not a biography in the traditional sense Wilson breaks the mould - it is
the portrait of an age seen through the prism of Goethe's continuing obsession with the Faust
myth - the story of a German necromancer who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for
knowledge and power. The relevance of this will not escape the modern reader and Goethe is
shown to be one of the great prophets of modern Europe the Europe of today.
