Conversations from the Cullman Center: Andrew Sott and Melanie Rehak

Melanie Rehak and Andrew Stott discuss his new book, The Vampyre and the Poet: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters, about the summer of 1816, which Lord Byron spent in the Swiss countryside with his friends John Polidori, Percy ­Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. Stott recounts how, encouraged by Lord Byron’s suggestion that the group trade ghost stories, Mary Shelley and Polidori went on to create two of literature’s most revered monsters:  Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the precursor to Bram Sto­ker’s Dracula.

A Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, Andrew McConnell Stott is the author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, which won the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography, and was a Guardian Best Book of the Year 2008. The Poet and the Vampyre is his first book to be published in America. Stott was a Fellow at the Cullman Center in 2011-2012.

Melanie Rehak is the author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (a New York Times bestseller and the recipient of an Edgar Award), and of Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid. She is the food columnist for Bookforum and has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Arts & Leisure, Vogue, and Slate. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New Republic. She is currently working on a book about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” She was a Fellow at the Cullman Center in 2003-2004.