Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole (1717–1797), youngest son of Britain's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, sat as a Member of Parliament for over two decades while building Strawberry Hill, his Twickenham villa remodeled in an invented Gothic style that helped launch the Gothic Revival in English architecture. The Castle of Otranto (1764), published first as a purported translation of a medieval Italian tale and acknowledged as his own only in its second edition, subtitled "A Gothic Story," is generally credited as the first Gothic novel. He also wrote extensively on art and anecdote and left, at his death, one of the largest surviving bodies of correspondence — some four thousand letters — of any eighteenth-century figure; he inherited the earldom of Orford from a nephew in 1791, four years before his death in London.