John William Polidori

John William Polidori was born in 1795 in London to an Italian father and an English mother. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, graduating at age 19. In 1816, he became Lord Byron's personal physician and accompanied him to Geneva, where he participated in the famous ghost-story contest that also inspired Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Polidori's own contribution, "The Vampire" (1819), was the first prose story to depict a vampire as an aristocratic, seductive predator, breaking from folkloric traditions. Initially misattributed to Byron, the story became a sensation across Europe, influencing authors like Bram Stoker. Polidori struggled with debt and depression, and died by suicide in 1821 at age 25. Though his literary output was small, his reimagining of the vampire archetype left a lasting mark on Gothic fiction and popular culture.