M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis

Born in London in 1775, Matthew Gregory Lewis was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. He gained lasting fame while still very young with The Monk (1796), a wildly popular and controversial novel that became one of the best-known works of early Gothic fiction.

Lewis also wrote plays, poems, and tales, and he moved in major literary circles of his time. He was associated with writers such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his taste for the eerie, dramatic, and supernatural made him a distinctive voice in British literature.

Later in life, he inherited estates in Jamaica and traveled there more than once. He died at sea in 1818 while returning from the Caribbean, leaving behind a reputation shaped above all by The Monk and by his lasting influence on the Gothic tradition.