The Famous Authors: Percy Bysshe Shelley

This documentary looks at the controversial life of the Nineteenth Century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley's life included being expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on the necessity of atheism and his first major poem advocating social and political reform through the abolition of several established institutions, including the promotion of vegetarianism and free-love. Eventually some of his writings were considered too radical for distribution in England. He later married a woman by the name of Mary Godwin, both traveling extensively throughout Europe. Shelley continued his political writings, advocating changes in the electoral process and improvements of lower-class education. He died early in life, a victim of the sea; his wife later wrote the classic novel Frankenstein.