A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and--as R?diger Safranksi emphasizes--a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel...