Johann Georg Faust, also known in English as John Faustus, was a German itinerant alchemist, astrologer and magician of the German Renaissance.
Doctor Faust became the subject of folk legend in the decades after his death, transmitted in chapbooks beginning in the 1580s, and was notably adapted by Christopher Marlowe in his play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. The Faustbuch tradition survived throughout the early modern period, and the legend was again adapted in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's closet drama Faust, Hector Berlioz's musical composition La damnation de Faust, and Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony of 1857.