Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

Frankenstein is the most celebrated horror story ever written and one of the best-selling books of all time. It is the tale of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist whose unbridled quest for the secret of life unleashes a creature that embodies our deepest fears about the moral bounds of human progress. Ever since the book's publication in 1818, readers have been fascinated with the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster and the unresolved ethical questions his creation challenges us to answer. At once a cautionary tale and a gripping novel about the destructive potential in human ingenuity and the desperate search for love and attachment, Frankenstein lives on in countless re-imaginings in literature and film. This Warbler Classics edition uses Shelley’s original 1818 text and includes an afterword by Ulrich Baer, Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition, and a detailed biographical timeline.

About the Author

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and the wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was eighteen years old when she began Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and with its publication in 1818 created science fiction as a genre. She went on to write six more novels, many short stories, and numerous articles, but Frankenstein, her masterstroke, remains her best-known work.Ulrich Baer holds a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Yale, and is University Professor at New York University. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships in recognition of his work. Among his books are Rainer Maria Rilke's The Dark Interval, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, We Are But a Moment, and What the Snowflakes Get Right.

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