Author. He was recognized as an English novelist of the eighteenth century. Born the only child on the Estate of Fonthill in Wiltshire, his father Alderman William Beckford, had been the Lord Mayor of London twice and had inherited a vast property with slaves on sugar plantations in Jamaica. This vast property became a ten-year-old William Thomas Beckford's property after his father's death. On May 5, 1783 Beckford married Lady Margaret Gordon, a daughter of the fourth Earl of Aboyne, and who died in childbirth in 1786 in Switzerland. He had two daughters, Margaret and Susan. After gaining a reputation of sexual aberrancy along with other crimes of the day, he chose to live in self-exile before being arrested, thus he spent a large part of his life traveling through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland. Most of his novels were written in French. As an author, he would boast about writing a novel in one single sitting of three days and two nights. From a young age, he was fascinated with the Arabic story of "Thousand and One Nights," a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. Using that child-like imagination, with his own travel experiences and reading a host of books on the subject, he started writing. After studying under Sir William Chambers and Alexander Cozens, he traveled to Italy in 1782, and wrote about his trip in the book "Dream, Waking Thoughts and Incidents" in 1783. His best-known work, the Gothic novel "Vathek" in 1786, was originally written in French. Continuing to write about places he visited, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters" in 1780, a satirical work and "Letters from Italy with Sketches of Spain and Portugal" in 1834. In the 1790s, he started building Fonthill Abbey, an ornate and very expensive construction, which was the venue of several lavished festivities. With the architect being killed in an accident, the final wing was never completed. He had another home in Lansdown Crescent in Bath. Beckford built an imposing tower on the stretch of land running up from his house in Lansdown, where he wished to be buried. However, as this land was unconsecrated, he was originally buried in the Abbey cemetery in 1844 in front of the chapel in a large granite sarcophagus placed above ground. During this period, people were afraid of being buried outside the grounds of a church. When Beckford's daughter built the Lansdown Cemetery, his body was reburied there near his tower, still encased in his granite tomb. With his life-style, he left little money for those in his will. His huge collection of paintings and other forms of art were originally given to his oldest daughter Margaret, but today they are on displayed at the National Gallery in London; in the Frick Collection, an art museum in New York City; other museums; and in private collections. His musical compositions are in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University. In 1823, William Beckford sold the Estate of Fonthill in Wiltshire to John Farquhar, a gunpowder contractor from Bengal, India, and three years later Farquhar died with the estate going to his nephew George Mortimer. In 1830 James Morrison purchased the estate and it has remained in his family to the 21st century.