William Beckford

William Beckford (1760–1844), fabulously wealthy, eccentric builder of Fonthill Abbey, wrote Vathek (1786), an ‘Arabian tale’ of a caliph’s damnation whose feverish exoticism and grand doom made it a cornerstone of Gothic and Oriental-fantasy fiction. Its influence runs through Byron, Poe and the whole tradition of luxuriant, macabre fantasy.