On the 165th anniversary of his birth, Google is today paying homage to Bram Stoker, the Irish-born author and short-story writer who is best known for his gothic horror novel Dracula.
When one clicks on today’s Dracula-inspired doodle on Google’s homepage, which features Stoker’s gothic villain Count Dracula, along with other characters from Dracula, users will be brought to the Knowledge Graph that Google started rolling out earlier this year. It specifically brings users to a search for ‘Bram Stoker books’.
Another element of the doodle today is that the Google logo appears to be designed to closely resemble the typeface in the first edition of Dracula back in 1897.
Stoker himself was born on 8 November 1847 in Clontarf in Dublin, the third of seven children. He went to Trinity College Dublin between 1864 and 1870, graduating with honours in maths.
Between 1870 and 1877 he worked as a civil servant at Dublin Castle, and he wrote short stories from 1872, including his first horror story The Chain of Destiny, as well as a non-fiction work titled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. In his early career he was also a theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail.
In 1878, Stoker married Florence Balcombe, with the couple moving to London where Stoker became acting manager at the actor Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. Stoker held this post for 27 years.
While working at the Lyceum Theatre, Stoker began writing novels, such as The Snake’s Pass in 1890. Before penning his gothic horror masterpiece Dracula in 1897, Stoker had spent many years researching mythological stories about vampires and European folklore. His most famous work was written as an epistolary form, in a series of letters and diary entries, as the vampire Count Dracula attempts to make it from Transylvania to England.
The novel which has been the inspiration for countless other vampire characters since then, has been translated into over 50 languages.
Stoker died in London on 20 April 1912.
Bram Stoker, circa 1906. Image via Wikipedia Commons
