Happy Birthday Bram Stoker

 

Perhaps it’s blasphemous to say so, like driving a stake through his art, because Abraham “Bram” Stoker wrote numerous novels (many now read as dated) and short stories (some hold up fine) and nonfiction (noted) and theater reviews (incisive enough to win a vital friendship). But Stoker never again concocted the exquisite literary elixir quite the way he did with his sublime story of “Dracula. “Stoker was born just outside Dublin in 1847, a period when millions of starving countrymen would walk dying and gaunt and haunted looking through Ireland during the Great Potato Famine. Stoker himself was a sickly child till about age 7, largely confined to indoors, and his mother would fill the bedridden boy with dark stories of shadowy figures from Irish folklore -- sparking his imagination before he suddenly became strong and athletic by adolescence (one biographer called him a “red-haired giant”). Some say it is these vivid childhood tales, and not real-life Romanian warrior Vlad the Impaler, that actually inspired the bloodthirsty Dracula. Of course not to sound clichéd, but the rest is history.