Horace Walpole

Born in London in 1717, Horace Walpole was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and later became a man of letters, collector, and politician as well as an author.

Walpole is most famous today for The Castle of Otranto (1764), a strange and inventive novel often credited with starting the Gothic tradition in English fiction. Alongside his fiction, he wrote essays, memoirs, and an enormous body of letters that made him one of the great chroniclers of 18th-century society.

He also left a mark through Strawberry Hill, his fanciful house at Twickenham, which reflected his love of medieval-inspired design and helped shape the Gothic Revival. Walpole inherited the title Earl of Orford late in life and died in London in 1797.