George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron) was one of the leading poets of English Romanticism. His long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage made him famous overnight, and his passionate, rebellious style and life had a great influence across Europe.
In the summer of 1816, while staying at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Byron proposed that each guest write a ghost story to pass the days when rain kept them indoors. From this contest came Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein and Polidori‘s The Vampyre. In his last years he threw himself into the Greek War of Independence and died of illness in Greece.
