During the latter half of the eighteenth century, readers in New England and the other seaboard colonies enjoyed German popular literature and political-historical treatises, which were available in the original as well as in translation. Often such literature was pietistic, mystical, and moralistic or religious. The fascination with the rationalistic philosophies of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) ran parallel to an interest in the biographies of such figures as Frederick the Great (1712–1786), ruler of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, who had challenged the English intellectual base. Friedrich Klopstock's Der Messias (1773) was repeatedly published in American magazines. Christoph Wieland's Oberon (1780) and the tales of Baron Munchausen earned a place in juvenile and humorous literature. Exemplary Sturm und Drang works such as The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by Johann von Goethe (1749–1832), were translated...