The Phantom of the Opera Centennial Edition

by Leroux, Gaston; Flynn, John L.

• ISBN13: 9780451528155
• ISBN10: 0451528158
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

The story of the Phantom of the Opera, a half-crazed musician hiding in the labyrinth of the famous Paris Opera House and creating a number of strange and mysterious events to further the career of a beautiful young singer, is today regarded as one of the most famous of all horror stories: widely mentioned in the same breath as Frankenstein and Dracula. Yet the fame of this novel is based almost entirely on the various film versions, while the original book has been largely ignored and is rarely in print. An Accelerated Reader® Title

Author Biography

Gaston Leroux, born in Paris in 1868, was a French journalist, playwright, and detective/thriller writer. After beginning his career as a crime reporter and war correspondent, he lived an adventurous life that took him to Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and even into North Africa disguised as an Arab. His high-spirited, often dangerous, escapades and questioning nature provided much of the background and plot material for his sensational mystery and adventure stories, particularly those starring his reporter/sleuth Joseph Rouletabille. One of his most famous detective novels, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, was published in 1907. His works have been called "among the finest examples of the detective stories we possess." But Leroux's best-known story is The Phantom of the Opera (1911), whose macabre hero has been played in films by classic horror film stars Lon Chaney and Claude Rains. Gaston Leroux died in Nice in 1927. Dr. John L. Flynn is a Chicago-born author, university professor, psychologist, and science-fiction enthusiast. In 1977, he received the M. Carolyn Parker Award for outstanding journalism, and in 1987, he was listed in Who's Who Men of Achievement. He sold his first book, Future Threads, in 1985, and he has subsequently had several other books published, including Cinematic Vampires, The Films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dissecting Aliens, Visions in Light and Shadow, and Phantoms of the Opera. A lifelong fan of Gaston Leroux, Dr. Flynn was inspired to write his definitive study of the Opera Ghost after seeing Michael Crawford on Broadway in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Tony Award-winning musical. In 1997, he switched gears from writing and literature to study clinical psychology. His study, The Etiology of Sexual Addiction: Childhood Trauma as a Primary Determinant, has broken new ground in the diagnosis and treatment of sexual addiction. Today, he lives in Baltimore with his wife and son and teaches courses on writing at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.