Not to be confused with the television news reporter in Minnesota of the same name.
John Lauritsen is an author and activist. Lauritsen wrote for the New York Native and was an early skeptic of the theory that HIV causes AIDS. He covered the debate over the safety of AZT. He is the founder of Pagan Press.
Simon LeVay and Elisabeth Nonas call Lauritsen's The AIDS War one of "a slew of books" that lump together the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry together for purposes of blame and whose "titles are sufficiently explicit to make further perusal unnecessary."
Lauritsen's The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein argues that poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, was the real author of Frankenstein. Camille Paglia gave it a favourable review, writing that, "Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of "Frankenstein"...and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist."
Germaine Greer dismissed Lauritsen's thesis, writing that while he argues that Mary Shelley was not well educated enough to have written it, Frankenstein is not "a good, let alone a great" novel and that it does not deserve the attention it has been given.