Dracula appeared in May 1897 from Archibald Constable; the typescript's earlier title was The Un-Dead, changed sometime between January and 8 May of that year. Stoker's working notes, from 1890 onward, survive at the Rosenbach Museum and show the count first named Count Wampyr and the castle first set in Styria. The name Dracula came out of William Wilkinson's An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), where a footnote reports that Dracula in the Wallachian language means devil; Joseph Bierman argued Stoker copied it at Whitby's public library in the summer of 1890, and later research shows he also had access in London. Emily Gerard's Transylvanian Superstitions (1885) and The Land Beyond the Forest (1888) supplied the folklore.
In 1922 Prana Film released Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation with the names changed and the story intact. Florence Stoker, the author's widow and executor, sued through the Society of Authors; Prana went bankrupt; in July 1925 a Berlin court ordered the negative and all prints destroyed. Prints had already crossed borders, a London copy was burned as late as 1929, an American print survived because the novel was public domain there, and every copy of Nosferatu in existence descends from the survivors. The vampire's first screen death was a court order, and it did not take.
The claim that Stoker modeled his count on Vlad the Impaler was popularized by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally's In Search of Dracula in 1972, four hundred and ninety-six years after Vlad's death and seventy-five after the novel. Elizabeth Miller's counter-case, built on the Rosenbach notes, is blunt: Stoker knew the name, the footnote, and nothing else of the voivode; the count's biography, his Transylvanian address, his methods, none of it is Vlad. The archive's Vlad the Impaler file covers the prince; this file notes that the famous merger of the two is a 1972 publication, not an 1897 one.
If the count is a collage of other people's books, which page is the real monster on?