by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1774, 167 pages

Love sucks. If you’re breathing, at some point in your life, love has probably bashed you over the head ... and then continued to kick you while you were down until you thought you might die. While most people believe the torment they experience over unrequited love is exclusive to them, “The Sorrows of Young Werther” realistically attests to the fact that heartbreak began occurring way before you confessed your love for someone, only to have him or her remove you as a MySpace friend.

“Sorrows” is the dramatic tale of Werther, a passionate young artist in Germany, told mostly through a series of letters written to his friend Wilhelm. Werther travels through the country to better his name and reputation in society by befriending people in higher standing. But, not long after leaving on his journey, he visits the town of Wahlheim, where he is immediately smitten with a girl named Lotte. You can tell just by reading the title that things aren’t going to go well for poor Werther.

Lotte is young, lovely and virtuous. The oldest of a group of orphaned children, she is forced to care for her many younger siblings. She is also spoken for—engaged to a much older man by the name of Albert. But Werther is convinced beyond all reason that this is more than cupidity and that Lotte is the woman for him. He pursues first her friendship and then her heart, even though he knows she belongs to another. “Man is human,” he writes, “and the small amount of intelligence one may possess counts little or nothing against the rage of passion and the limits of human nature possessing him.”

The sensible Lotte, thinking of her brothers and sisters, kindly rejects Werther, knowing that Albert is a much sounder bet. Distraught, Werther flees town, where he holes up and writes of his distress and pain to Wilhelm. “Oh, this void, this terrifying void I feel in my breast! I often think: if you could once, only once, press her to your heart, this void would be filled.” (If Werther existed today, you could imagine him dashing off tortured blog entries and doing a bit of drunk dialing.)

Werther makes matters worse for himself in a new town by accidentally dropping in at a friend’s house on a day the betters of society are gathering. Here, he is shunned and embarrassed, irreparably damaging his standing. Now a social outcast, he returns to Wahlheim in the hopes of seeking comfort in the arms of Lotte, who is now married to Albert. Once again, he is refused and left feeling hopeless. Distraught and crazed, Werther is certain that the only way to resolve the matter is for one of them to die.

While it may sound whiny, Goethe so eloquently expresses what it feels like to have your heart ripped in two—to want something you can’t have so much it’s making you mad—that it’s hard not to identify. Goethe even admitted that the novel was loosely autobiographical, which is apparent in his ability to express heartache so well. Upon the book’s publication in 1774, so many people related to the story that it made him the world’s first literary celebrity. It even spawned a phenomenon known as Werther-Fieber, or Werther Fever. All over Europe, young men took to emulating Werther’s style of dress and actions and flocked to Garbenheim, the town after which Wahlheim was modeled.

Later in life, having written many other works, Goethe came to loathe the fact that “Sorrows” was still his best known work. Still, he could not blame the rejected lovers who sought it out. “It must be bad,” he said, “if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.”