Bram Stoker

Stoker spent his first seven years bedridden with an illness never satisfactorily identified, listening to his mother's stories of cholera and famine in Sligo. He recovered so completely that he became an athletics champion at Trinity College Dublin, and then spent his life doing something entirely unliterary: for twenty-seven years he was the acting manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, running the business of the actor Henry Irving.

Dracula was written in that job's margins, over seven years of notes that still survive — dated, cross-referenced, meticulous. He found the name in Whitby's public library, in a traveller's account of Wallachia, alongside a note that it meant devil; he never went to Eastern Europe, and built Transylvania out of borrowed books and a Yorkshire coastline he knew.

The novel did moderately well and made him no fortune. He died in 1912; his death certificate records locomotor ataxy, which some have read as tertiary syphilis and others dispute, and there is not enough evidence to settle it. Ten years later his widow Florence sued the makers of Nosferatu, an unauthorised German adaptation, and won an order that every print be destroyed. Copies survived anyway.