John William Polidori (1795–1821), a British physician and writer of Italian origin, is a key figure of Romanticism and the father of modern vampire literature. Having earned his medical degree at just nineteen with a dissertation on sleepwalking, he was hired in 1816 as Lord Byron's personal physician, accompanying him on his famous trip through Europe.
In June of that same year, at the famous Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Polidori took part in the legendary ghost story contest with Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. That gathering birthed the draft of The Vampyre, published in 1819. With this tale, Polidori transformed the vampire from a folkloric monster into a charming, aristocratic, and decadent figure - embodied in the character of Lord Ruthven -, laying the groundwork for the myth later enshrined by Bram Stoker in Dracula.
His life was short and troubled: overshadowed by Byron's fame (to whom the story was initially and erroneously attributed) and disheartened by personal and financial struggles, Polidori died by suicide in London in 1821, aged only twenty-five.\
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