Goethe in His Frankfurt Study, Self-Portrait (1770-73) Following his education as a lawyer at the universities of Leipzig and Strasbourg, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) – later ennobled as “von Goethe” – spent the early years of his literary career (1771-75) in his native Frankfurt, where he composed his major Sturm und Drang works: the drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773), the epistolary novel of youth and thwarted love The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and his lyric poems Prometheus and Ganymede. Watercolor and pencil drawing by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1770-73.