Mark Twain and Dracula

You can find Mark Twain in the most unexpected places--for example, the pages of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), where the fearless vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing mentions "an American" who once defined faith as "that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue." Twain put it better when he said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Twain and Stoker were on close terms for almost twenty years, getting together for the last time in 1907, during Twain's final visit to London. They spent that time swapping ghost stories beside a flickering fire at a London pub--the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street. You can still get a pint there.