Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774.

[1][2] The novel is made up of biographical and autobiographical facts in relation to two triangular relationships and one individual: Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff (who married Kestner); Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche (who married Brentano), and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who died by suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772.

These give an intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on Garbenheim [de; it; nl], near Wetzlar),[4] whose peasants have enchanted him with their simple ways.

Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing beforehand that she is engaged to a man named Albert, eleven years her senior.

He suffers great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend and unexpectedly has to face there the weekly gathering of the entire aristocratic set.

Werther was one of Goethe's few works aligned with the aesthetic, social and philosophical ideals that pervaded the German proto-Romantic movement known as Sturm und Drang, before he and Friedrich von Schiller moved into Weimar Classicism.

The novel was published anonymously, and Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years,[1] regretting the fame it had brought him and the consequent attention to his own youthful love of Charlotte Buff, then already engaged to Johann Christian Kestner.

"[6] Goethe described the powerful impact the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by his vengeful ghost.

[...](...)“On considering more closely the much-talked-of ‘Werther’ period, we discover that it does not belong to the course of universal culture, but to the career of life in every individual, who, with an innate free natural instinct, must accommodate himself to the narrow limits of an antiquated world.

Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature, having written a Goethe-inspired soliloquy in his youth and carried Werther with him on his campaigning to Egypt.

[12] When Goethe completed Werther, he likened his mood to one experienced “after a general confession, joyous and free and entitled to a new life”.

[15] The Hebrew translation יסורי ורתר הצעיר was popular among youths in the Zionist communities in British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and was blamed for the suicide of several young men considered to have emulated Werther.