Goethe's 1774 epistolary novel made him famous across Europe almost overnight. The story of a young man driven to suicide by unrequited love caused a sensation — and allegedly a wave of copycat suicides — that is hard to imagine a novel provoking today. Goethe wrote it at twenty-four, drawing on his own infatuation with Charlotte Buff in nearby Wetzlar.
Reading it before visiting Weimar gives you a sense of the intensity Goethe brought to everything, and of the Sturm und Drang sensibility that preceded Weimar Classicism. The novel is short and still readable, if melodramatic by modern standards. You will see Goethe's world differently afterward.