Poet, statesman, artist, scientist, rebel, conservative, mythmaker and iconoclast. Taking his early cues from Homer, Shakespeare and the Bible, he created cultural icons at once modern and steeped in tradition. He wrote exquisite love poetry throughout his long life. His first drama made him a household word at twenty-two. His novel Werther was an instant international bestseller. He despised Newtonian science and would rather be wrong than the man’s disciple. He adored the younger Humboldt and considered him his only intellectual superior. But his enduring legacy is Faust, sixty years in the making, the transformation, through many detours, of a scatterbrained scholar into an engineering genius dedicated to acquiring new land for settlement, not by colonial conquests and expropriation as was customary, but by draining swamps and building dikes to push back the sea. He remains restless and dissatisfied, forever attempting to outreach his grasp,  defiantly raising his own Tower of Babel, but is redeemed in the end for those very qualities, never mind his pact with the devil and the corpses on his path to salvation.  There is a hidden agenda too, a transformation, just as profound, of the jealous God of orthodoxy into a generous deity who looks on with benign consent as our protagonist and part-time theologian turns humanist: "Presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man."