Famous Imposters

Famous Impostors is the last of four non-fiction books completed by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. It features numerous historical impostors and hoaxes. The first edition was published by the Sturgis & Walton Company of New York in November 1910, stated on the copyright page.

Turning to fiction late in life, Stoker published his first novel, The Snake¿s Pass, a romantic thriller with a bleak western Ireland setting, in 1890. His masterpiece, Dracula, appeared in 1897. The novel is written chiefly in the form of diaries and journals kept by the principal characters: Jonathan Harker, who made the first contact with the vampire Count Dracula; Wilhelmina (¿Mina¿) Harker (née Murray), Jonathan¿s eventual wife; Dr. John (¿Jack¿) Seward, a psychiatrist and sanatorium administrator; and Lucy Westenra, Mina¿s friend and a victim of Dracula who herself becomes a vampire. The story is that of a Transylvanian vampire who, using supernatural powers, makes his way to England and there victimizes innocent people to gain the blood on which he survives. Led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing¿Seward¿s mentor and an expert on ¿obscure diseases¿¿Harker and his friends, after many hair-raising adventures, are at last able to overpower and destroy Dracula.
Two years after Stoker¿s death, his widow, Florence Stoker, published as part of a posthumous collection of short stories Dracula¿s Guest, which, most contemporary scholars believe, text editors had excised from the original Dracula manuscript. In 2009 Dacre Stoker (great grandnephew of the author) and Ian Holt produced Dracula: The Un-Dead, a sequel that is based on the novelist¿s own notes and excisions from the original. The sequel, which shuns the epistolary style of the first Dracula for traditional third-person narrative, is a thriller set in London in 1912, and it features Bram Stoker as a character.
Stoker wrote several other novels¿among them The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), and The Lady of the Shroud (1909)¿but none of them approached the popularity or, indeed, the quality of Dracula.

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