Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole (1717-1797) was an English writer, art historian and man of letters, the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. In 1764 he published The Castle of Otranto anonymously, presenting it as his own translation of a medieval Italian manuscript; when a popular second edition appeared the following year he acknowledged authorship and added the subtitle A Gothic Story, coining the term that named the genre the novel is credited with founding. Walpole was also the builder of Strawberry Hill, his Twickenham villa remodeled from the 1740s onward in a fanciful Gothic Revival style, where he also ran his own private press. He inherited the earldom of Orford from a nephew late in life, in 1791, and was among the most prolific letter writers of the eighteenth century, with several thousand surviving letters forming a major historical record of the period.