- Published: 5 January 1999
- ISBN: 9780679640066
- Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 352
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.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
At the age of eighteen, Mary Shelley, while staying in the Swiss Alps with her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, conceived the tale of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the monster he brings to life. The resulting book, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, is a dark parable warning against the risks of scientific and creative endeavor, the corrupting influence of technology and progress, and the dangers of knowledge without understanding. Frankenstein was an instant bestseller on publication in 1818 and has long been regarded as a masterpiece of suspense, a classic of nineteenth-century Romanticism and Gothic horror, and the prototype of the science fiction novel. Though it has spawned countless imitations and adaptations, it remains the most powerful story of its kind.
- Published: 5 January 1999
- ISBN: 9780679640066
- Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 352
Other books in the series
About the author
Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.
