Bram Stoker, Irish novelist and critic, created Count Dracula (died 1912)

Abraham Stoker, better known by his pen name Bram Stoker, was an Irish theatre manager and novelist. He is best known as the author of Dracula (1897), an epistolary Gothic horror novel that is considered by commentators to be a landmark in vampire literature. The work deeply influenced future representations of vampiric characters and Stoker popularly came to be regarded as "the father of vampire fiction."

Count Dracula is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. He is considered the prototypical and archetypal vampire in subsequent works of fiction. Aspects of the character are believed by some to have been inspired by the 15th-century Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, who was also known as Vlad Dracula, and by Sir Henry Irving and Jacques Damala, actors with aristocratic backgrounds that Stoker had met during his life. Count Dracula is also one of the best-known fictional figures of the Victorian era.