Gaston Leroux

Gaston Leroux was born on May 6, 1868 in Paris, France. He was the son of a store owner. Leroux was raised in Normandy where he spent most of his time on the coast. He loved sailing and unloading the herring catch. As a child, Gaston loved writing verse in his free time. He was educated at the College of Eu, a Normandy grammar school, and he received his degree in 1889 (Perry). Leroux studied law in order to please his father, but when his father died, Leroux refrained and began to pursue a career in writing. Leroux received an inheritance when his dad passed away, but he wasted it on drinking and gambling within a period of a year. After he had spent all of his money, Leroux began to write novels in 1909. By 1927, he has already produced two dozen newspaper serials, many shorter works, and seven plays (Gaston Leroux).

Although Leroux was best known for his novel Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1911, it didn't attract a lot of attention at first. Gaston spent a lot of his time at the Palais Garnier opera house. That was where he got the idea to write this story. The opera house consisted of twenty-five hundred rooms, some being used as dungeons. It also had a huge chandelier and an underground lake. Leroux claimed that the underground levels and the mysterious lake were an ambience for a mystery book. That building linked Gaston's life with his book. Although there were not a lot of similarities between him and the book, there is one more besides the opera house. The other connection that Leroux's life had to his book was a chandelier accident. While writing Phantom of the Opera, Leroux remembered the unfortunate accident of 1896 when one of the chandelier's counterweights fell on the audience (Perry). In the book, there is also a chandelier that falls on an audience.

On April 15th, 1927, Gaston Leroux died. His cause of death was an acute attack of uraemia after an operation that he had. He