Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part dramatic poem (Part One 1808, Part Two 1832), worked on across some sixty years — often called the supreme work of German literature, in which a restless scholar who has exhausted human knowledge makes a pact with the devil Mephistopheles, wagering his soul for boundless experience. Goethe reworked an older legend in which Faust is damned; his Faust, controversially, is saved. The poem became the central modern myth of striving and its price, and gave the language the phrase 'Faustian bargain.'
A brilliant scholar has read everything and learned nothing that satisfies him. In despair, he summons the devil and strikes a wager: let the devil show him every pleasure and power, and if a single moment is ever so perfect that Faust begs it to stay, his soul is forfeit. The older versions of this story end one way. Faust gets his knowledge, and then he is dragged screaming into hell. Goethe took that story and did something scandalous with it. After a lifetime of striving and sin, after ruining an innocent woman and reshaping the land itself, his Faust is carried up to heaven instead. The argument over whether he deserved it has never stopped.