Johann August Apel

Johann August Apel (September 17, 1771 – August 9, 1816) was a German writer and jurist. Apel was born and died in Leipzig.

Influence 
His version of the traditional German Freischütz folk tale, "Der Freischütz" was published as the first story of the first volume of his and Friedrich Laun's Gespensterbuch horror anthology (1811). Johann Friedrich Kind and Carl Maria von Weber drew on this version as the main source for the story of their opera Der Freischütz (1821), and even abandoned their working title to capitalise on the popularity of Apel's tale. It was republished in its own book after Apel's death.

Two of his other short stories ("Die Bilder der Ahnen" and "Die schwarze Kammer") were included in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès' Fantasmagoriana (1812), which was read by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland during the Year Without a Summer, inspiring them to write their own ghost stories, including "The Vampyre" (1819), and Frankenstein (1823), which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre. "Die Bilder der Ahnen" (translated by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson in Tales of the Dead (1813) as "The Family Portraits") especially influenced Mary Shelley, who described it in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein:

Works 
 Die Aitolier (1806)
 Das Gespensterbuch (1811–1815) with Friedrich Laun
 Kalliroe (1806)
 Metrik (1814–1816)
 Polyidos (1805)
 The Original Legend of Der Freischuetz, or The Free Shot (1833)

References

External links

 
 

Category:1771 births
Category:1816 deaths
Category:People from the Electorate of Saxony
Category:German jurists
Category:19th-century German novelists
Category:Writers from Leipzig
Category:German male novelists
Category:19th-century German male writers
Category:19th-century jurists