Johann August Apel
Johann August Apel was a German writer and jurist. Apel was born and died in Leipzig.Influence
His version of "Der Freischütz" was published as the first story of the first volume of his and Friedrich Laun's Gespensterbuch horror anthology. Friedrich Kind and Carl Maria von Weber drew on this version as the main source for the story of their opera Der Freischütz. On recommendation of Carl von Brühl they abandoned their working title The Hunter's Bride to the better known title of Apel's tale.
Two of his other short stories were included in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès' Fantasmagoriana, 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", and Frankenstein, which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre. "Die Bilder der Ahnen" especially influenced Mary Shelley, who described it in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein:Works
