The Vampyre (Forgotten Books)
About the Author:"John William Polidori (7 September 1795 - 24 August 1821) was an Italian English physician and writer, known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction.Polidori was the oldest son of Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political emigre scholar, and Anna Maria Pierce, a governess. He had three brothers and four sisters.He was one of the earliest pupils at recently established Ampleforth College from 1804, and in 1810 went up to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1 August 1815 at the age of 19.In 1816 Dr. Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician, and accompanied Byron on a trip through Europe. At the Villa Diadoti, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her husband-to-be, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their companion (Mary's step-sister) Claire Clairmont.One night in June, after the company had read aloud from the Tales of the Dead, a collection of horror tales, Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale, The Vampyre, the first vampire story published in English.Rather than use the crude, bestial vampire of folklore as a basis for his story, Polidori based his character on Byron. Polidori named the character "Lord Ruthven" as a joke. The name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon, in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven.Polidori's Lord Ruthven was not only the first vampire in English fiction, but was also the first fictional vampire in the form we recognize today - an aristocratic fiend who preys among high society.Dismissed by Byron, Polidori travelled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, "The Vampyre", was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission, whilst in London he lived and died in Great Pulteney Street (Soho). Much to both his and Byron's chagrin, "The Vampyre"..."(Quote from wikipedia.org)