The Faust Myth: Fernando Pessoa's Fausto and C. G. Jung's The Red Book

The story of Faust is widely regarded as one of the great modern myths, along with Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe. ¹ The earliest published account of the legend is Historia von D. Johann Fausten [The History of Dr Johann Faust ], a crude chapbook published in Frankfurt in 1587. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was first performed about 1593. The most ambitious account of the story is Goethe’s Faust, published in two parts: Part One (1808) and Part Two (posthumous, 1832). Late nineteenth-century adaptations of the myth are mostly disappointing, but in the early twentieth century, a young Portuguese writer injected new life into the myth.