'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus'

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Dr. Viktor Frankenstein longs to infuse "life into an inanimate body." When he succeeds, he recoils from the creature he's created. The novel opens with the doctor's rescue from an iceberg where he's been fleeing his own creation. On the ship, he relates his story. By the end, the reader is not sure who has humanity: the doctor himself and by extension the rest of us, or the monster. Shelley was only twenty-one in 1818 when this iconic novel was published anonymously.