Short answers, pulled from the story.
Frankenstein was written by the English author Mary Shelley and first published anonymously in London on the 1st of January 1818. She was 20 years old when it appeared, and her name first appeared in print on a French translation published in Paris in 1821.
Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature from different body parts in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The 1818 Gothic novel follows Victor's horror at his creation and the destruction that follows as the creature seeks recognition and revenge.
Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein during the rainy summer of 1816 at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, after Byron suggested that the group each write a ghost story. The idea came to her as a waking dream that astronomer Donald Olson later dated to between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on the 16th of June 1816.
Frankenstein is the name of Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, while his creation is never given a name in the novel. After James Whale's 1931 film with Boris Karloff, the public at large began calling the Creature itself Frankenstein, and the misnomer continued through later films such as Bride of Frankenstein.
The German name Frankenstein means "stone of the Franks" and is attached to several places in Germany, including Frankenstein Castle in Darmstadt and a village in the Palatinate. Mary Shelley said she derived the name from a dream-vision, though scholars such as Radu Florescu have argued she may have known of Frankenstein Castle, where the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies.
Brian Aldiss argued that Frankenstein is the first true science-fiction story because Victor Frankenstein "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. The novel is now generally considered one of the first science fiction novels as well as a landmark Romantic and Gothic work.