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Encyclopedic overview
Faust is the protagonist of a German legend about a magician who makes a pact with the Devil. The character is based on a real person, Johann Georg Faust (c. 1500), but the story is fictional, and modeled largely on ancient sources.
The first version of the Faust legend is the anonymously-authored polemical book, Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587). This in turn gave rise to the following important dramatic works:
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Faust” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.