Full Name: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Profession: German poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and all‑round polymath whose literary and scientific work shaped European culture; Nationality: German (born a subject of the Holy Roman Empire, later a citizen and privy councillor of Saxe‑Weimar); Born: 28 August 1749, with his life spanning into the early nineteenth century until 22 March 1832, when he died at the age of 82; Birthplace: Free Imperial City of Frankfurt am Main in the Holy Roman Empire (now Frankfurt am Main, state of Hesse, Germany), born into a well-to‑do bourgeois family headed by lawyer and imperial councillor Johann Kaspar Goethe and his wife Katharina Elisabeth Textor; Generation: Eighteenth‑century German Enlightenment and early Romantic era figure, leading representative of the Sturm und Drang movement and the Weimar Classicism generation, a cultural contemporary of the broader European Enlightenment whose work bridged late Baroque, Enlightenment rationalism, and early Romanticism and helped define modern German literature; Chinese Zodiac: Earth Snake in the sexagenary cycle, as 1749 corresponds to a Snake year with an Earth element in the traditional Chinese calendar, placing his birth under the sign of the Snake with an earthy, pragmatic tone according to later Chinese zodiac reconstructions. Zodiac Sign: Virgo, because the Sun in the Western tropical zodiac lies in Virgo for births between roughly 23 August and 22 September, and numerous modern birthday listings and horoscopes classify those born on 28 August, including Goethe, as Virgo natives; Age in 2026: 277 years old on 28 August 2026 if hypothetically still alive; Marital Status: Cohabited from the late 1780s with Johanna Christiana Sophia (Christiane) Vulpius, with whom he had an enduring partnership, and formally married her on 19 October 1806 in Weimar, remaining married until her death in 1816, after which he lived as a widower; Children: Father of five children with Christiane Vulpius, four of whom died in infancy, with only their eldest son Julius August Walther von Goethe (often known simply as August von Goethe), born in 1789 and later a chamberlain in Weimar, surviving to adulthood, so his direct surviving lineage flowed primarily through this son; Description: Goethe was widely regarded as the greatest writer in the German language and one of the foremost literary figures of modern Europe, a polymath whose achievements ranged from poetry and drama to novels, aesthetic theory, natural science, and public administration; his early international fame came with the psychologically powerful epistolary novel “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers” (“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” 1774), which sparked a wave of “Werther‑fever” across Europe and made him a central voice of the Sturm und Drang movement, while his later work with Duke Carl August in Weimar positioned him as a leading statesman overseeing cultural, educational, and economic reforms in the duchy; over decades he developed a vast oeuvre including the Bildungsroman “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” (“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”), the novel “Elective Affinities,” the autobiographical “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (“Poetry and Truth”), his travel classic “Italian Journey,” extensive lyric and narrative poetry, and essays and treatises on topics such as plant morphology, comparative anatomy, geology, meteorology, and color theory, in which he proposed his own phenomenological alternative to Newtonian optics in “Zur Farbenlehre” (“Theory of Colours”); his lifelong engagement with classical antiquity and his collaboration and dialogue with figures like Friedrich Schiller helped create the Weimar Classicism synthesis of reason and feeling, form and freedom, and his magnum opus “Faust,” a two‑part dramatic poem completed shortly before his death, is often considered Germany’s most significant contribution to world literature and a profound exploration of knowledge, desire, and salvation that influenced thinkers, artists, and spiritual seekers well beyond the German‑speaking world; Cause of Death: Died in Weimar on 22 March 1832 after an illness in old age, with contemporary medical descriptions by his physician referring to “suffocation due to catarrhal fever” (Stickfluss), interpreted by modern scholars as heart failure with pulmonary complications, and some later summaries describing the immediate cause of death more specifically as an acute myocardial infarction.