Johann Martin Miller

During his years in Göttingen, Miller mainly wrote folk songs, many of which were set to music during his lifetime and are still found in different songbooks today.

"Die Zufriedenheit" ("Contentedness"), his most popular poem, was set to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Christian Gottlob Neefe ("Was frag ich viel nach Geld und Gut, / Wenn ich zufrieden bin" ("What need have I of funds and goods / While I am just content").

Eine Klostergeschichte ("Siegwart, a Monastic Tale"), which he had already begun to work on in Göttingen - a great success which, accordings to the number of reprints and similar to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, became one of the best sold novels of the time.

[4] From 1776 to 1777 appeared his Briefwechsel dreyer Akademischer Freunde ("Correspondence of Three Friends at the Academy"), an epistolary novel, once described as "an example of the diversity of intellectual currents ... in the Age of Enlightenment".

A short autobiographical essay, written by Miller in 1793 and published in a widely read periodical, is one of the main sources of his life.