The Salvation of Faust: The Making of the Modern World

’Wild, brilliant and has all the intelligence to rival its subject. Five Stars.’ - Frances Wilson, The Telegraph
’Exuberant and wide-ranging’ - Literary Review
’Passionate’ - The Times

A spellbinding recreation of Goethe’s life and work from one of our greatest biographers.

Goethe was the inventor of the psychological novel, a pioneer scientist, great man of the theatre and a leading politician. As A. N. Wilson argues in this groundbreaking biography, it was his genius and insatiable curiosity that helped catapult the Western world into the modern era.

A N. Wilson tackles the life of Goethe with characteristic wit and verve. From his youth as a wild literary prodigy to his later years as Germany’s most respected elder statesman, Wilson hones in on Goethe’s undying obsession with the work he would spend his entire life writing - Faust.

Goethe spent over 60 years writing his retelling of Faust, a strange and powerful work that absorbed all the philosophical questions of his time as well as the revolutions and empires that came and went. It is his greatest work, but as Wilson explores, it is also something much more - it is the myth of how we came to be modern.

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is one of the outstanding biographers of our time - his biographies of Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Milton and Hilaire Belloc are beyond compare.
He is also a celebrated novelist - his novel, Winnie and Wolf, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His last book The Mystery of Charles Dickens was published in 2020 to great critical acclaim and is at present being dramatized by Andrew Davies for British television. He lives in North London.