Faust: The Bargain at the Heart of the Modern World

A brilliant, restless scholar has learned everything the books can teach and is sick with the emptiness of it. So he makes a wager with the Devil: Mephistopheles will serve him, show him every experience the world can offer, and the moment Faust is finally satisfied — the moment he says to any passing hour, ‘stay, you are so beautiful’ — his soul is forfeit. That bargain, in Goethe’s hands, became the defining myth of the modern age.

Goethe worked on Faust for sixty years, and it grew into something enormous: not a simple morality tale about damnation, but the story of striving itself — of the modern human being who cannot rest, cannot be satisfied, who must always want more, know more, do more. Faust is Western civilization with its restless engine and its terrible cost, and Goethe refuses the easy ending. His Faust seduces and destroys the innocent Gretchen, reaches for infinite power — and is, astonishingly, redeemed at the last, because he never stopped striving.

It is the poem the modern world keeps rewriting, because it is about us: our genius, our hunger, and the price of never being content.

This edition presents Faust alongside Goethe’s other major works, including the Werther that made him famous.

Read The Major Works of Goethe →