The Goethe Society of North America was founded in December 1979 in San Francisco as a non-profit organization dedicated to the encouragement of research on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and his age.

As a learned society, the organization seeks to:

• stimulate a reappraisal of the pertinence of Goethe's thought in modern times;
• foster scholarly lectures and symposia about Goethe and his age;
• develop extensive research facilities for the study of eighteenth-century literature and culture; and
• re-emphasize Goethe's concept of world literature in terms of today's globality of cultural discourses.