TheBramauthor Stoker Abraham ( Bram ) Stoker was born in Clontarf, near Dublin (Ireland), on 8th November 1847. He spent his early childhood in bed because of his poor health. In the 1860s he attended1 Trinity College in Dublin, where he took part in the University Athletics Championship and served as President of the Philosophical Society. In 1871 he graduated with honours in Science (Pure Mathematics) and soon after took a job as a civil servant2 in Dublin Castle. He also started a fiveyear period as a theatre reviewer3. In 1876 he reviewed Henry Irving s performance in Hamlet and this gave him the opportunity to meet the actor and start a close4 friendship with him. Two years later he accepted an offer to become the manager at Irving s Lyceum Theatre in London, and so he moved there with his wife, Florence Balcombe. In the same year he also had his first book published, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. Under the Sunset, a collection of short stories, was published four years later, in 1882, but it was only in 1890 that he began working on a vampire novel. It was while spending a summer in Whitby that he came across5 the name Dracula . Before this novel was published on 26th May 1897, he wrote and published another novel, The Snake s Pass (1891). In 1905 Henry Irving died, and a year later, to commemorate him, Stoker published Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. His last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, was published in 1911, a year before his death, on 20th April 1912. 1. attended: went regularly to. 2. civil servant: a person who works in the civil service. 3. reviewer: a person who writes his/her opinions of a book, play, etc., in a newspaper or magazine. 4. close: intimate. 5. came across: met by chance. 4