Books by Bram Stoker

After a bedridden childhood, Abraham Stoker attended Trinity College in Dublin. There he served as president of the Philosophy Society before graduating with honors in science. Stoker began working as a theater reviewer for Dublin's The Evening Standard in 1871, an unpaid job he held for five years while also holding a civil service job. Having always been in interested in fiction, he wrote short stories-- his first publication came in 1872. His first long work, THE PRIMROSE PATH, was published in 1875. Around this time, he also wrote his first book, a non-fiction handbook about his civil service job called DUTIES OF CLERKS IN PETTY SESSIONS IN IRELAND, but it was not published until 1878. In 1876 he reviewed a performance of HAMLET that starred Henry Irving, who went on to become the first actor to receive a knighthood. Becoming close friends with Irving, he moved to London in 1878, and became the manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre. That same year, he married Florence Balcombe, who gave birth to a child, Noel, the following year. Stoker's first work of fiction, UNDER THE SUNSET (1882) was a collection of eight allegorical fairy tales. His work at the Lyceum kept him extremely busy, and it wasn't until 1890 that his next book, his first novel, appeared as THE SNAKE'S PASS. That year, Stoker also began to research a new book that would eventually take him seven years to complete. 1897's DRACULA introduced the modern myth of the vampire in its title character, and has become one of the most famous books ever written--even if most people know it by the film versions as opposed to the actual book. Stoker continued to write novels after DRACULA, but it is generally agreed that the quality diminished. His final work, THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1911), was a relatively short but largely incoherent novel about a shape-shifting worm. Stoker also kept writing short stories, and these seemed to fare much better. The posthumous DRACULA'S GUEST AND OTHER WEIRD TALES (1914) contains an unused section from the novel, along with minor classics like "The Burial of the Rats" and "A Dream of Red Hands", among others. Stoker died in 1912.