Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther

1774

A 24-year-old Frankfurt lawyer published a short epistolary novel about an artistic youth's doomed love and suicide. It swept Europe in months. Young men wore blue coats and yellow waistcoats in Werther's honor; a wave of copycat suicides followed. Romanticism had found its first fever. Napoleon claimed to have read it seven times and carried it on the Egyptian campaign as a kind of talisman.