author
M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis
1775–1818
Best known as “Monk” Lewis, he burst onto the literary scene while still very young with The Monk, a scandalous Gothic novel that became one of the era’s defining shockers. His work helped shape the darker, supernatural mood that later readers came to love in Gothic fiction.
2 Audiobooks
The Monk: A Romance
by M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis
Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica
by M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis
About the author
Born in London on July 9, 1775, Matthew Gregory Lewis was an English novelist and dramatist who became famous almost overnight after the 1796 publication of The Monk. The book’s blend of horror, desire, violence, and the supernatural made it notorious as well as popular, and it earned him the lasting nickname “Monk” Lewis.
Lewis was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, and he also worked in diplomacy early in life. Alongside The Monk, he wrote plays, poems, and tales that drew on German Romantic and Gothic influences, helping bring a more vivid, sensational style into English popular literature.
Although modern readers mainly remember him for one novel, Lewis was an energetic literary figure with a strong taste for drama, storytelling, and the macabre. He died in 1818 at sea, but his reputation has endured through the long afterlife of Gothic fiction and the strange, feverish power of The Monk.