Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. The narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker flees after learning that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunts and kills him.
The novel was mostly written in the 1890s, and Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes, drawing extensively from folklore and history. Scholars have suggested various figures as the inspiration for Dracula, including the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, but recent scholarship suggests otherwise. He probably found the name Dracula in Whitby’s public library while on holiday, selecting it because he thought it meant ‘devil’ in Romanian.
