Posted on March 1, 2011 | 
As long as I’m celebrating the DEAD LOVE Bram Stoker Award nomination, I thought I might devote a word or two to Dracula’s big daddy, although eventual suicide John William Polidori, author of the 1912 novel The Vampyre, will always have “grandpa status” in my mind.
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was a late 19th Century Irish novelist and author of Dracula, which was published in 1897 when he was 50. Oh, but he was so much more:
- Actor Henry Irving’s personal assistant
- Theater critic
- Business Manager of the Lyceum Theater in London
- Husband of Florence Balcombe once courted by Oscar Wilde
- Friend to Oscar Wilde
- Distant relation to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Father to Irving Noel Thornley Stoker
- Rumored member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Definitely a son of Erin (the country), Bram had definite thespian leanings, which—as you know—I have as well (don’t forget I’m now a star in Social Media Theater through Reorbit). He was also quite interested in expanding the boundaries of the novel and grounding it in a myth that could take root in reality, and he was quite successful, in my opinion.
The first film adaption of his novel, Nosferatu, was produced in 1922, ten years after his death, starring Max Schreck as Count Orlock.
—Erin Orison, DEAD LOVE/the Daily Slice
