Author: George Byron

George Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement.Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets, and remains widely read and influential. He traveled widely across Europe, especially in Italy where he lived for seven years. Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829) fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which many Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died one year later at age 36 from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece. Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs with people of both sexes, rumors of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile.He also fathered the Countess Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), whose work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine is considered a founding document in the field of computer science, and Allegra Byron (1817–1822), who died in childhood - as well as, possibly, Elizabeth Medora Leigh (1814–1849) out of wedlock.

A Brief History “Fragment of a Novel” (1819) is an unfinished vampire horror story written by Lord Byron (1788–1824).  The story, also known as “A Fragment” and “The Burial: A Fragment”, was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme.  The main character was Augustus Darvell.  John William Polidori (1795–1821) based his novella The Vampyre (1819) on the Byron fragment.  The vampire in the Polidori story, Lord Ruthven, was modelled on Byron himself.  The story was the result of the meeting that Byron had in 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) where a “ghost writing” contest was…

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