English novelist, letter writer and politician, the son of Robert Walpole. He was a Whig member of Parliament 174167.
He converted his house at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (then a separate town southwest of London), into a Gothic castle; his
The Castle of Otranto (1764) established the genre of the Gothic, or romance of terror, novel. More than 4,000 of his letters have been published. He became Earl in 1791.
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