Johann August Apel (17 September 1771 – 9 August 1816) was a German writer and jurist. Apel was born and died in Leipzig.
Influence
"" was Apel's version of the Freischütz folktale, and it was published as the first story of the first volume of his and Friedrich Laun's Gespensterbuch horror anthology (1810). Friedrich Kind and Carl Maria von Weber drew on this version as the main source for the story of their opera Der Freischütz (1821). On recommendation of Carl von Brühl they abandoned their working title () to the better known title of Apel's tale.
Two of his other short stories: "" () and "" () were included in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès' Fantasmagoriana (1812), 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" (1819), and Frankenstein (1823), which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre. "" (translated by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson in Tales of the Dead (1813) as "The Family Portraits") especially influenced Mary Shelley, who described it in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein:
Works
Plays
Polyïdos (1805) Die Aitolier (1806) Kalliroe (1806) Kunz von Kaufungen (1809)
Short story collections
Cicaden (1810–1811) Gespensterbuch (1810–1815) with Friedrich Laun Wunderbuch volumes 1–2 (1815–1816) with Friedrich Laun Zeitlosen (1817)
Non-fiction
Contributions to Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1800–1810) Contributions to Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (1802) Metrik (1814–1816)
Librettos
Friedrich Schneider's Das Weltgericht (c. 1820)