This is a tough one to catalog on LT, with so many different editions dividing it in so many different ways. Wikipedia tells me there are four "parts" of five "books" (chapters?) each, but various editions split these across volumes in all sorts of ways. My ebook cuts off halfway through Part 2, and I only read to the end of Part 1.

Goethe's earliest childhood memories included tossing and smashing all his household's new crockery into the street for the thrill of entertaining neighbourhood children - how great is that? Reading the rest of Part One taught me the core of his origins. He demonstrated a genius for learning and curiosity from a young age. He came from a well-to-do household that could afford to educate him with the best tutors, and he had some say in which tutors he received. He could study and pick up languages in a snap: German, Italian, French, English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He wasn't a man who came from nothing or through hardships; it's a story of someone who applied himself in an ideal environment, amply challenged and rewarded by his betters.

Part One is mostly not too bad to get through (although he basically reviews the entire book of Genesis at one point), but it took the wind out of my sails about continuing when I learned Goethe's biographers consider this an unreliable source. Goethe admitted to inventing or exaggerating events (poetry) from his life (truth) to make a better story out of it. I trust he was at least honest about his influences, since he believed that to be the most important portion of any man's history. Embellished descriptors of other people seems to be the primary complaint. Gretchen possibly never existed, and knowing that is what countered the hook at the end of Part One that otherwise would have kept me going.

Goethe is likened often to Shakespeare in the pantheon of literary figures. I wish the Bard had been able to leave us even this much of a personal history. ( )