[Flashback] Dracula by Bram Stoker—“the events really took place…”

Bram Stoker claimed that parts of Dracula were real.

Published in 1897, the classic vampire novel Dracula was written by Bram Stoker as a story told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. During a business visit to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania, a young English solicitor finds himself at the center of a series of horrifying incidents. Jonathan Harker is attacked by three phantom women, observes the Count's transformation from human to bat form, and discovers puncture wounds on his own neck that seem to have been made by teeth.

Harker returns home upon his escape from Dracula's grim fortress, but a friend's strange malady—involving sleepwalking, inexplicable blood loss, and mysterious throat wounds—initiates a frantic vampire hunt…

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The making of the novel Dracula

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in the 1890s. He produced more than a hundred pages of notes for the novel, generating ideas based on both folklore and history. He found the name “Dracula” at the public library, and chose to use it because he thought it was the Romanian word for “devil.”

According to TIME magazine, the book’s original preface included this message from the author:

I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.

In the decades since the book was published, the story and the characters have appeared in hundreds of adaptations in all different kinds of media—including movies, TV, comic books, games, and pretty much everything else. Count Dracula has actually appeared in more than 500 movies—which is way more than any other literary character. (Next in line, Sherlock Holmes, has appeared in a mere 300 movies.)

About the author

Abraham (Bram) Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish writer educated in science, math, oratory, history, and composition. His writing was greatly influenced by his father’s interest in theatre and his mother’s gruesome stories about her childhood during the cholera epidemic in 1832. Although a published author of the novels Dracula, the mummy thriller The Jewel of Seven Stars and more, Stoker made his living as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London.

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