The Sorrows of Young Werther

Werther is young, gifted, and feels everything at maximum intensity, spring meadows, Homer, village children, and then, fatally, Lotte, whom he meets cutting bread for her younger siblings and cannot thereafter un-meet. She is promised to Albert: decent, steady, and everything Werther is not. What follows, told almost entirely through Werther's own letters, is the slow-motion record of an obsession, rapturous at first, then increasingly unable to find anywhere for itself to live.

Goethe wrote it at twenty-four, drawing on his own bruises, and it made him famous overnight: young men across Europe dressed in Werther's blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and the book was blamed (and banned) for the mania it inspired. Two and a half centuries later it remains the definitive anatomy of loving someone you cannot have, compact enough to hear in a few sittings and uncomfortably easy to recognize yourself in.

At roughly 43,300 words, The Sorrows of Young Werther runs about 5 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

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