Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula

"What a splendid subject to sink one's teeth into," raved theWashington Post. Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red bearda Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except forDracula, which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, James Whistler, William Gladstone, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's lifea real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that theBaltimore Suncalled "superb," Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his vampire tale, and the political, occult, cultural, and sexual background of the 1890s.

Barbara Belford has written several biographies on Victorian literary figures, including Violet Hunt and Oscar Wilde. A professor emeritus at Columbia University, she lives in New York City.