Son of a conservative, Protestant civil service clerk and the third of seven children, Bram Stoker was a fragile youth who suffered from a life-threatening illness; he could not walk unaided until the age of seven. His early sickness was replaced by vigorous health as he became a young man; he competed in athletics at Trinity College and excelled in mathematics and the sciences. After graduation, it appeared that Bram would follow in his father’s footsteps: He took a civil service post at Dublin Castle, where his father worked. His position made him privy to Dublin’s most exclusive salons ; Oscar Wilde and his parents were intimate friends, and Bram vied with Oscar for the hand of the future Mrs. Florence Balcombe Stoker. During his seven years of civil service, Stoker cultivated his nascent literary career. He published theater reviews, short stories, and a political address; he also began a correspondence with the American poet Walt Whitman that lasted until the poet’s death.

Although Stoker wrote his first, much-admired book The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) on his civil-service profession and returned to Trinity to give talks on various topics, he ultimately chose to live a more artistic life in London. An 1876 reading of the poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram” by the actor Henry Irving profoundly affected Stoker; the two men became close friends, and Stoker worked as business manager for Irving’s Lyceum Theatre from 1878 until the actor’s death in 1905. As in his earlier life, during these years Stoker was involved in an impressive range of endeavors.

He devoted a great amount of energy and time to Irving, fathered his only child, Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, and published frequently. He also lectured on the subject of the United States, studied law, and was given a Bronze Medal by the Royal Society for attempting to save a suicide.

Stoker put his indelible mark on the centuries-old vampire myth with the publication and stage debut of Dracula in 1897. The novel caused a sensation—reactions were mixed and heated. Nevertheless, Dracula’s popularity has endured for more than a century. Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, perhaps praised Dracula most accurately when she said that no novel, apart from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is comparable “in originality, or terror.”

Stoker continued to publish widely, although his other works failed to attain the immortality of Dracula. While on tour with the Lyceum company in 1905, he witnessed the death of his longtime colleague and friend, Henry Irving. The next year Stoker suffered the first of two strokes. With his wife and son at his bedside, Bram Stoker died on April 20, 1912.