Faust

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe follows a scholar whose hunger for knowledge, experience, pleasure, and meaning leads him into a pact with Mephistopheles. The drama moves through philosophy, comedy, seduction, tragedy, politics, myth, and spiritual striving, making Faust one of literature's great figures of restless human ambition.

Readers interested in world literature, philosophical drama, and stories of temptation will find Faust vast, difficult, and endlessly suggestive. Goethe does not make Faust a simple warning against curiosity; he explores the grandeur and danger of wanting more than ordinary life seems to offer. The work endures because it turns desire itself into a problem of ethics, imagination, guilt, striving, knowledge, power, freedom, love, loss, and salvation.