Abraham Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author who wrote the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.

In his early years, Stoker worked as a theatre critic for an Irish newspaper and wrote stories as well as commentaries.

He also enjoyed travelling, particularly to Cruden Bay in Scotland where he set two of his novels and drew inspiration for writing Dracula.

Since his death, his magnum opus Dracula has become one of the best-known works in English literature and the novel has been adapted for numerous films, short stories, and plays.

[3] His parents were Abraham Stoker (1799–1876), an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (1818–1901), of English and Irish descent, who was raised in County Sligo.

While working for the Irish Civil Service, he became the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail,[10] which was co-owned by Sheridan Le Fanu, an author of Gothic tales.

Stoker also wrote stories, and "Crystal Cup" was published by the London Society in 1872, followed by "The Chain of Destiny" in four parts in The Shamrock.

In 1876, while a civil servant in Dublin, Stoker wrote the non-fiction book The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (published 1879), which remained a standard work.

The collaboration with Henry Irving was important for Stoker and through him, he became involved in London's high society, where he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom he was distantly related).

Working for Irving, the most famous actor of his time, and managing one of the most successful theatres in London made Stoker a notable if busy man.

In the course of Irving's tours, Stoker travelled the world, although he never visited Eastern Europe, a setting for his most famous novel.

He also met one of his literary idols, Walt Whitman, having written to him in 1872 an extraordinary letter[14] that some have interpreted as the expression of a deeply-suppressed homosexuality.

[22] Stoker began writing novels while working as manager for Irving and secretary and director of London's Lyceum Theatre, beginning with The Snake's Pass in 1890 and Dracula in 1897.

During this period, he was part of the literary staff of The Daily Telegraph in London, and he wrote other fiction, including the horror novels The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).

Before writing Dracula, Stoker met Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian-Jewish writer and traveller (born in Szent-György, Kingdom of Hungary now Svätý Jur, Slovakia).

[24] However this claim has been challenged by many including Elizabeth Miller, a professor who, since 1990, has had as her major field of research and writing Dracula, and its author, sources, and influences.

There had been nothing in their conversations about the "tales of the terrible Dracula" that are supposed to have "inspired Stoker to equate his vampire-protagonist with the long-dead tyrant."

[25] Stoker then spent several years researching Central and East European folklore and mythological stories of vampires.

[26] However, according to Elizabeth Miller, Stoker borrowed only the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about Romanian history; further, there are no comments about Vlad III in the author's working notes.

At the time of its publication, Dracula was considered a "straightforward horror novel" based on imaginary creations of supernatural life.

[23] They are classified alongside other works of popular fiction, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which also used the myth-making and story-telling method of having multiple narrators telling the same tale from different perspectives.

Author Robert Latham remarked: "the most famous horror novel ever published, its title changed at the last minute".

He had a writer's interest in the occult, notably mesmerism, but despised fraud and believed in the superiority of the scientific method over superstition.