Short answers, pulled from the story.
Apuleius was accused around 158 AD of using charms and magic spells to win the affections and fortune of Pudentilla, a wealthy widow he had married. The case was heard before the proconsul Claudius Maximus in Sabratha, near Tripoli. Apuleius delivered his own defense, later published as the Apologia, and the accusation appears to have failed.
The Golden Ass, also called the Metamorphoses, follows a protagonist named Lucius who experiments with magic and is accidentally transformed into a donkey. In that form he witnesses unusual events before being restored to human form through the intervention of the goddess Isis. It is the only ancient Latin novel to have survived in its entirety.
Apuleius was born around 124 AD in Madauros, a colonia in the Roman province of Numidia, in what is now M'Daourouch, Algeria. He described himself as "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian." He and his brother inherited nearly two million sesterces upon the death of their father, a municipal magistrate.
Apuleius wrote De Platone et dogmate eius, a two-book outline of Plato's physics and ethics with a prefatory life of Plato, and a treatise on daemons as intermediaries between gods and humans. He also compiled Florida, a collection of twenty-three excerpts from his speeches and lectures, and translated Plato's Phaedo into Latin.
Apuleius's treatise on daemons contains the first recorded written occurrence of the proverb "familiarity breeds contempt," rendered in Latin as parit enim conversatio contemptum, raritas conciliat admirationem. The work was attacked at length by Augustine of Hippo in Books VIII through X of The City of God.
The date, place, and circumstances of Apuleius's death are unknown. No record of his activities survives after 170 AD; scholars estimate he died sometime between 171 and 190. Many of his works, including technical treatises on medicine, astronomy, music, and agriculture, have not survived.