The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein might be accepted by readers with no vested interest in the issue, it would be "vehemently rejected out of hand" by the "literary establishment". Sadownick wrote that Lauritsen confirmed his view that "Frankenstein" is a gay work in the same sense as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" (1855) and Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1897), and offered a commendable psychological analysis, and a sensitive line-by-line reading, of the work. Charles E. Robinson rejected Lauritsen's thesis in "The Original Frankenstein" (2008), arguing that the testimony of authors such as Lord Byron, William Godwin, Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Leigh
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein is a 2007 book written and published by John Lauritsen, in which the author argues that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of "Frankenstein" (1818), that the novel "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted", and that its dominant theme is "male love". Lauritsen maintains that handwriting cannot be used to determine the actual author of "Frankenstein". His work received positive reviews in gay publications. However, some commentators in other publications rejected Lauritsen's views and supported the conventional view that "Frankenstein" was written