Abraham ("Bram") Stoker was born in a suburb of Dublin on November 8, 1847. Until the age of seven, he was an invalid. Stoker himself once said about his illness: "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."
After his recovery he started school and later became a student of the famous Trinity College in Dublin. In 1876 he discoverd his interest in theatre and began to write theatre reviews for The Dublin Mail.
Two years later he married Florence Balcombe and moved to London, where he became the business manager of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, a post he held for 27 years. With his good friend Henry Irving he travelled around the world and collected folklore stories. In 1890 on one of his travels he met Ármin Vámbéry, who told him the legend of Vlad Tepes Drakulea. The idea for the novel Dracula was born...
After that he visited the seaside town of Whitby / Yorkshire for holiday trips several times and beneath the shadow of the ruined Abbey and also influenced by the strange tales of the local fishermen, he began to write his novel Dracula, which was finally published in 1897.
Bram Stoker wrote several other novels, but Dracula certainly is his most famous work. It is an epistolary novel which is told via diary entries, letters and even newspaper articles. The novel deals with a spectrum of topics, some of them certainly unusual for the Victorian Age, for example the consequences of modernity and the threat of female sexual expression, as well as more traditional themes such as the promise of Christian salvation.
Unfortunately Stoker died in 1912 in London and did not live to see the big success of his novel Dracula.
