Horace Walpole

Born in 1717, the youngest son of Britain's first prime minister, Walpole grew up in the machinery of Whig power but made his mark elsewhere. He built Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, reviving Gothic architecture decades before the Victorians ran with it. In 1764 he published The Castle of Otranto, inventing the Gothic novel as a genre. He served as a politician, wrote history, collected antiquities, and above all wrote letters—thousands of them, sharp and gossipy, mapping the social and political currents of his century. Yale eventually published them in 48 volumes. He inherited his nephe…