Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 in Sussex, England, to a wealthy, politically conservative family—a background he would spend most of his life pushing against. In 1811, he got expelled from Oxford for co-authoring a pamphlet titled *The Necessity of Atheism*, which reveals a lot about who he was at just nineteen. He eloped twice: first with Harriet Westbrook and later with Mary Godwin—who would go on to write *Frankenstein*—after the tragic death of Harriet by suicide in 1816.
Shelley moved among influential figures of the Romantic era. He was a close friend of Lord Byron, and the three of them, including Mary, spent a famous summer in Geneva in 1816 that sparked some of the most memorable writing of that time. Shelley's creative output during his brief life was remarkably ambitious: he wrote long philosophical poems, political odes, lyrical verses with extraordinary musicality, and a verse drama, *Prometheus Unbound*, that feels like a manifesto for human liberation.
“His political views were genuinely radical for his time.”
He was a dedicated republican, a vegetarian, an advocate for Irish independence, and deeply opposed to the ruling class into which he was born. These weren't just empty gestures—he distributed pamphlets, penned political essays, and allowed his beliefs to cost him relationships, his inheritance, and his social standing. His poem *The Masque of Anarchy*, written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, stands as one of the most powerful protest poems in the English language.
Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, Italy, in 1822, just a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, when his sailing boat capsized in a storm. He was cremated on the beach, and his ashes were buried in Rome, close to the grave of his friend John Keats.
