The Sorrows of Young Werther is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.