El hombre de cincuenta años

In 1807, at the age of fifty-eight, Goethe begins The Fifty-Year-Old Man, a story about maturity and the decisions that are made during it. It is an introspective tale about William Whittlestaff, a fifty-year-old bachelor who takes in the daughter of a friend when he dies and with whom he falls deeply in love. We could identify the protagonist with the author, thus having a biographical part, since it is known that, even without completing this work, in 1823, the author falls in love with a teenage girl, Ulrike. Faced with the refusal of this young woman, unlike the story that seems to be a parallel version collected from contemporary texts, Goethe will write that summer a beautiful poem: the "Elegy of Marienbad." Derived from this love story, there was a scandal that promoted the misunderstanding of his family, as well as the testimony of Ulrike herself.