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<b>Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley</b> (1797 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel <i>Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus</i> (1818). She also edited the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel <i>Frankenstein</i>. Her novels include <i>Valperga</i> (1823), <i>Perkin Warbeck</i> (1830), <i>The Last Man</i> (1826), <i>Lodore</i> (1835), and <i>Falkner</i> (1837). <b>Francine Prose</b> is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel <i>A Changed Man</i> won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and <i>Blue Angel</i> was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed <i>Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife</i>, and the <i>New York Times</i> bestseller <i>Reading Like a Writer</i>. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is <i>Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932</i>. She lives in New York City.
How did it happen that this modest gothic tale, which was only about a hundred pages long in its first draft, became caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber, amplifying through the years until, a hundred and sixty-four years later, we have a cereal called Frankenberry . . .an old TV series called The Munsters . . .Aurora Frankenstein model kits . . .and a saying such as He looked like Frankenstein as a kind of apotheosis of ugly? Stephen King
