The Sorrows Of Young Evan: How Broadway's Biggest Hit Might Be A 1774 German Novel
Note: This blog post is lengthier than usual. Read it when you have time. *** "Thwarted happiness, confined activity, and unsatisfied wishes are not faults of a given period, but the problems of every single person, and it would be a bad thing if, once in his life, everyone did not have a period in which he felt that Werther had been written exclusively for him." So said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe regarding his 1774 epistolary novel, The Sorrows Of Young Werther , about a young artist who goes to a quaint little village, falls in love with a woman who does not love him back, wallows in self-pity for a little while, and then shoots himself with her husband's pistol. It became wildly popular, regarded as one of the most significant and influential works in romantic literature (a movement which Goethe later derided as "everything that is sick") and served as an inspiration for many subsequent works. It also lends its name to a sociological phenomenon. Tod...