- Published: 1 January 1982
- ISBN: 9780553212471
- Imprint: Bantam Dell
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 256
- RRP: $15.99
Frankenstein
Or The Modern Prometheus
The most famous horror story in world literature—the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster—is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.
Mary Shelley’s classic work of Gothic horror that blurs the line between man and monster—with an introduction by Diane Johnson
Now a major motion picture directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Oscar Isaac
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”
A summer evening’s ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine room, and a runaway imagination—fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life—conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece about the ambitious scientist Victor Frankenstein and the monstrous creature he created.
Written in 1816, when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley’s novel of “The Modern Prometheus” chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.
- Published: 1 January 1982
- ISBN: 9780553212471
- Imprint: Bantam Dell
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 256
- RRP: $15.99
Other books in the series
About the author
The idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Godwin during a summer sojourn in 1816 with Percy Shelley on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron was also staying. She was inspired to begin her unique tale after Byron suggested a ghost story competition. Byron himself produced “A Fragment,” which later inspired his physician John Polidori to write The Vampyre. Mary completed her short story back in England, and it was published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Among her other novels are The Last Man (1826), a dystopian story set in the twenty-first century, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). As well as contributing many stories and essays to publications such as the Keepsake and the Westminster Review, she wrote numerous biographical essays for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1835, 1838–39). Her other books include the first collected edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetical Works (4 vols., 1839) and a book based on the Continental travels she undertook with her son Percy Florence and his friends, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Mary Shelley died in London on February 1, 1851.