SOURCE: "The Blasted Tree," in The English Novel and the Movies, edited by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981, pp. 52-66.

In the following essay, Friedman compares Whale's adaptation of Frankenstein to the original novel by Mary Shelley.

In the "wet, ungenial summer" of 1816, a season filled with incessant rain that often confined her for days on end to her house in Geneva, Mary Shelley found herself in almost constant contact with one uncommon and two extraordinary men. However bad the weather may have been that year, it was nonetheless a period of unusual creative productivity for these four people. During the days in Switzerland Byron worked on "Canto Three" of Childe Harold, wrote Prometheus, and began Manfred. His friend Percy Shelley completed "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc" and undoubtedly began thinking about what would eventually become his masterful epic poem, Prometheus Unbound...