- Goethe's work was the basis for the 1892 opera Werther by Jules Massenet.[17]
- In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster finds the book in a leather portmanteau, along with two others – Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and Milton's Paradise Lost.[18] He sees Werther's case as similar to his own, of one rejected by those he loved.
- The book influenced Ugo Foscolo's The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, which tells of a young man who commits suicide, out of desperation caused not only by love, but by the political situation of Italy before Italian unification. This is taken to be the first Italian epistolary novel.
- Thomas Carlyle, who incidentally translated Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister into English, frequently refers to and parodies Werther's relationship in his 1836 novel Sartor Resartus.[19]
- The statistician Karl Pearson's first book was The New Werther.
- William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a poem satirizing Goethe's story entitled "Sorrows of Werther".[20]
- Thomas Mann's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and his youthful passion, Charlotte Buff, as elderlies.
- A 2002 episode of the Canadian television series History Bites titled "Love & Death" is about the cultural impact of Werther, with Bob Bainborough satirically portraying Goethe in 1780 as a guest on a talk show spoofing The Rosie O'Donnell Show. Goethe wants to discuss his newest work, an adaptation of Iphigenia in Tauris, but is annoyed by having to deal with obsessive fans of Werther.
- Ulrich Plenzdorf, a GDR poet, wrote a satirical novel (and play) called Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. ("The New Sorrows of Young W."), transposing the events into an East German setting, with the protagonist as an ineffectual teenager rebelling against the system.[21]
- In William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, the novel appears next to Harrington's unsealed suicide note.
- The 2010 German film Goethe! is a fictional account of the relations between the young Goethe, Charlotte Buff and her fiancé Kestner, which at times draws on that of Werther, Charlotte and Albert.
- The 2014 novel The Sorrows of Young Mike by John Zelazny is a loosely autobiographical parody of Goethe's novel.[22]
- In the 2015 game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's Blood and Wine expansion pack, there is a treasure hunt called "The Suffering of Young Francois", where a man named François seeks help from a witch to make a woman named Charlotte, who is engaged with Albert, fall in love with him. The witch tricked François, making a Spriggan appear in the state and murder everyone. When François learns of this, he hangs himself.
- The story is read in the first episode of the 2019 series Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung.
- The story is read to the dragon Temeraire by Captain William Laurence in Naomi Novik’s novel Black Powder War, the third book in the Temeraire series.
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