Lord Byron, English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric She Walks in Beauty. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs with people of both sexes, rumors of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. He travelled all over Europe, especially in Italy where he lived for seven years, and then joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died one year later at the age of 36 from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.