The Reading Warehouse

A masterpiece of nineteenth-century gothic horror, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also has the distinction of being the first science fiction novel. Dr. Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious young scientist, is consumed by a fanatic desire to create a living being. He fashions an eight-foot creature and succeeds in animating him but, horrified by his visage, perceives his creation to be a monster and frightens him away. The monster, wandering in search of human companionship, is spurned and repulsed by all he approaches, and learns to hate and to kill. He confronts his maker with a terrible choice: unless Frankenstein creates for him a mate, he will go on a rampage of destruction.

A subversive tale about the corrupt tendencies in humanity's most "civilized" ambitions, this haunting thriller maintains its hold in the collective imagination centuries after its first publication.

Julie Harris is one of America's most versatile and gifted performers. She starred as Lilimae Clements in the popular series Knots Landing. She is best known to theater audiences for her Tony Award-winning portrayal of poet Emily Dickinson in the one-woman show The Belle of Amherst.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born in London, the second daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, well known feminist, philosopher, educator, and writer, and William Godwin, famous English philosopher, novelist, and journalist. She was best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen and published when she was twenty-one. She was married to the Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley.