In the summer of 1816, five young people (Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori) came together on the shores of Lake Geneva to spend the summer. It would be one of the most important events in literary history and result in the creation of a work that would never go out of print. That work is the novel Frankenstein. This is the story of how it all happened, and the tragedy that struck in its aftermath. Painstakingly researched and thoroughly documented. 134 footnotes.