John William Polidori was an English physician and writer. He earned a medical degree at a young age and traveled as personal physician to the poet Byron.
His short story The Vampyre, written after the 1816 ghost-story contest at the Villa Diodati, was published in 1819. Partly because it was at first wrongly advertised as Byron’s work, it caused a sensation. Depicting an aristocratic, charming vampire, it is considered the starting point of vampire literature that led to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and beyond. Together with Frankenstein, born on the same occasion, it made its mark on the history of Gothic literature.
