{{Infobox book | name = The Historian | title_orig = | translator = | image = Historiancover.jpg | alt = Dark brown book cover saying "The HISTORIAN"; then "A Novel" in a shiny gold stripe, then "ELIZABETH KOSTOVA". A few thin reddish streaks stretch from the top almost to the bottom. | caption = The Historians first edition cover shows a blood red curtain with a snippet of a picture of a man's face laid across it. Although the book is a vampire novel, Kostova promised herself "that only a cup of blood would be spilled" in the novel. | author = Elizabeth Kostova | illustrator = | cover_artist = | country = United States | language = English | series = | subject = | genre = | published = 2005 (Little, Brown and Company) | pages = | isbn = 0-316-01177-0 | oclc = | dewey = | congress = | preceded_by = | followed_by = }}The Historian''' is the 2005 debut novel of American author Elizabeth Kostova. The plot blends the history and folklore of Vlad Țepeș and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula. Kostova's father told her stories about Dracula when she was a child, and later in life she was inspired to turn the experience into a novel. She worked on the book for ten years and then sold it within a few months to Little, Brown and Company, which bought it for .The Historian has been described as a combination of genres, including Gothic novel, adventure novel, detective fiction, travelogue, postmodern historical novel, epistolary epic, and historical thriller. Kostova was intent on writing a serious work of literature and saw herself as an inheritor of the Victorian style. Although based in part on Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Historian is not a horror novel, but rather an eerie tale. It is concerned with history's role in society and representation in books, as well as the nature of good and evil. As Kostova explains, "Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history." The evils brought about by religious conflict are a particular theme, and the novel explores the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Little, Brown and Company heavily promoted the book and it became the first debut novel to become number one on The New York Times bestseller list in its first week on sale. As