Bram Stoker books: 9 things you didn't know about the 'Dracula' author

Bram Stoker is the godfather of the vampire craze, but the writer is often a mystery to modern readers. Here are 9 facts you probably don't know about the author.

2. Stoker’s admiration of Walt Whitman blossomed into a lifelong friendship

When he was 22, Stoker read “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman’s poetry collection that would change the young novelist’s life. So enthralled with the American poet was he that Stoker penned a nearly 2,000-word letter to Whitman describing himself and pouring out his love for the poet and his works.

“I have to thank you for many happy hours, for I have read your poems with my door locked late at night, and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea: and here I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book lying open before me,” he wrote.

He closed, “I have been more candid with you – have said more about myself to you than I have ever said to any one before.”

That letter began a surprising literary friendship that lasted until Whitman’s death.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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