Bram Stoker

Stoker was a bedridden, sickly child in Dublin who willed himself into a robust young athlete at Trinity College before settling into a career as a civil servant and theater critic. A rapturous review of the actor Henry Irving led to a job offer that changed his life: for twenty-seven years he managed Irving's business affairs at London's Lyceum Theatre, touring America with the company multiple times.

He wrote Dracula (1897) in the margins of that exhausting job, after years spent researching Eastern European folklore and vampire legend, possibly borrowing the historical Vlad the Impaler's name for his count. The novel sold modestly in his lifetime; its fame, and the vampire's afterlife on stage and screen, built almost entirely after his death.

Stoker died in 1912, comparatively poor, having never seen the full scale of what he'd made.