•Why it earns a slot
Goethe's Faust Part One gave Western literature its defining image of the modern intellectual bargaining away moral responsibility for unlimited experience, and its Gretchen tragedy remains one of the most devastating portrayals of how male ambition destroys an innocent woman.
The scholar Faust, despairing that a lifetime of learning has brought him no true knowledge, makes a wager with the devil Mephistopheles: if Mephistopheles can ever make Faust content enough to wish a moment to last forever, Faust's soul is forfeit. Mephistopheles leads Faust into the world of pleasure and seduction, where Faust falls in love with the innocent young Margarete (Gretchen). The affair ends in catastrophe: Gretchen's mother dies from a sleeping potion, her brother Valentin is killed in a duel, she drowns her illegitimate child, and is condemned to death, while Faust flees with Mephistopheles.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.