Dracula.

Dracula, published in 1897, is the most influential vampire novel ever written and one of the foundational works of Gothic horror. Bram Stoker, an Irish writer and for nearly three decades the business manager of the actor Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London, spent some seven years researching and writing the book, drawing on Eastern European folklore and contemporary anxieties about science and sexuality to create Count Dracula, the suave and predatory vampire who has become one of the most enduring figures in all of literature. Told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings, the novel follows the solicitor Jonathan Harker, the resolute Mina Murray, and the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing as they pursue the Count from the Carpathians to England and back. Only a modest commercial success in its day, the novel nonetheless drew admiring notices, among them a letter from the author’s own mother, who told her son, “It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror.” Dracula has never gone out of print, has been translated into countless languages, and has inspired an unbroken succession of stage and screen adaptations that have made the vampire a permanent fixture of modern popular culture.