Dan Brown

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Dan Brown
Born	June 22, 1964 (1964-06-22) (age 45) Exeter, New Hampshire, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist
Genres	Thriller, Mystery fiction
Official website

Dan Brown (born June 22, 1964) is an American author of thriller fiction, best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Brown's novels feature the recurring themes of cryptography, keys, symbols, codes, and conspiracy theories. His books have been translated into over 40 languages, and as of 2009, sold over 80 million copies.

Brown's novels that feature the lead character Robert Langdon also include historical themes and Christianity as recurring motifs, and as a result, have generated controversy. Brown states on his website that his books are not anti-Christian, as he is a Christian himself, and says of his book The Da Vinci Code that it is simply "an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate" and suggests that the book may be used "as a positive catalyst for introspection and exploration of our faith".^[1]

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Songwriter and pop singer 3 Writing career 3.1 Film adaptations 3.2 Copyright infringement cases 3.3 Planned works 4 Personal life 5 Philanthropy 6 Criticism 7 Works 7.1 CDs 7.2 Humor writing 7.3 Novels 7.4 Films 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Early life and education

Dan Brown was born and raised in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA, the eldest of three children. His mother Constance (Connie) was a professional musician, playing organ at church. Brown's father Richard G. Brown was a prominent mathematics teacher, writing textbooks and teaching high school mathematics at Phillips Exeter Academy from 1968 until his retirement in 1982.

Phillips Exeter Academy is an exclusive boarding school, which requires new teachers to live on campus for ten years, so Brown and his siblings were raised at the school.^[2] His own schooling was at public schools in Exeter until the 9th grade, at which time he enrolled in Phillips Exeter (Class of 1982), as did his younger siblings Valerie (1985) and Gregory (1993).

After graduating from Phillips Exeter in 1982. Brown attended Amherst College, where he was a member of Psi Upsilon fraternity. He played squash sang in the Amherst Glee Club, and was a writing student of visiting novelist Alan Lelchuk. Brown spent the 1985 school year abroad in Seville, Spain, where he was enrolled in an art history course at the University of Seville.^[3] He graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English in 1986.

[edit] Songwriter and pop singer

After graduating from Amherst, Brown dabbled with a musical career, creating effects with a synthesizer, and self-producing a children's cassette entitled SynthAnimals which included a collection of tracks such as "Happy Frogs" and "Suzuki Elephants"; it sold a few hundred copies. He then formed his own record company called Dalliance, and in 1990 self-published a CD entitled Perspective, targeted to the adult market, which also sold a few hundred copies.

In 1991 he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as singer-songwriter and pianist. To support himself, he taught classes at Beverly Hills Preparatory School.

He also joined the National Academy of Songwriters, and participated in many of its events. It was there that he met Blythe Newlon, a woman 12 years his senior, who was the Academy's Director of Artist Development. Though not officially part of her job, she took on the seemingly unusual task of helping to promote Brown's projects; she wrote press releases, set up promotional events, and put him in contact with individuals who could be helpful to his career. She and Brown also developed a personal relationship, though this was not known to all of their associates until 1993, when Brown moved back to New Hampshire, and it was learned that Blythe would accompany him. They married in 1997, at Pea Porridge Pond, a location near North Conway, New Hampshire.^[4]

In 1993, Brown released the self-titled CD Dan Brown, which included songs such as "976-Love" and "If You Believe in Love".

In 1994, Brown released a CD titled Angels & Demons. Its artwork was the same ambigram by artist John Langdon, which he later used for the novel Angels & Demons. The liner notes also again credited his wife for her involvement, thanking her "for being my tireless cowriter, coproducer, second engineer, significant other, and therapist." The CD included songs such as "Here in These Fields" and the religious ballad "All I Believe."^[5]

Brown and Blythe moved to his home town in New Hampshire in 1993. Brown became an English teacher at his alma mater Phillips Exeter, and gave Spanish classes to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at Lincoln Akerman School, a small school for K–8th grade with about 250 students, in Hampton Falls.^[6]

[edit] Writing career

While on holiday in Tahiti in 1993,^[3] Brown read Sidney Sheldon's novel The Doomsday Conspiracy, and decided that he could do better.^[7][3] He started work on Digital Fortress, setting much of it in Seville, where he had studied in 1985. He also co-wrote a humour book with his wife, 187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman, under the pseudonym "Danielle Brown". The book's author profile reads, "Danielle Brown currently lives in New England: teaching school, writing books, and avoiding men." The copyright is attributed to Dan Brown.

In 1996, Brown quit teaching to become a full-time writer. Digital Fortress was published in 1998. His wife, Blythe, did much of the book's promotion, writing press releases, booking Brown on talk shows, and setting up press interviews. A few months later, Brown and his wife released The Bald Book, another humor book. It was officially credited to his wife, though a representative of the publisher said that it was primarily written by Brown. Brown's subsequently wrote Deception Point and Angels and Demons, the latter of which was the first to feature the lead character, Harvard symbology expert Robert Langdon.

Brown's first three novels had little success, with fewer than 10,000 copies in each of their first printings; however, Brown's fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, became a runaway bestseller, going to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list during its first week of release in 2003. It is now credited with being one of the most popular books of all time, with 81 million copies sold worldwide as of 2009.^[8][9] Its success has helped push sales of Brown's earlier books. In 2004, all four of his novels were on the New York Times list in the same week,^[10] and in 2005, he made Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the year. Forbes magazine placed Brown at #12 on their 2005 "Celebrity 100" list, and estimated his annual income at US$76.5 million. The Times estimated his income from 'Da Vinci Code' sales as $250 million.

Characters in Brown's books are often named after real people in his life. Robert Langdon is named after John Langdon, the artist who created the ambigrams used for the Angels & Demons CD and novel. Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca is named after "On A Claire Day" cartoonist friend Carla Ventresca. In the Vatican Archives, Langdon recalls a wedding of two people named Dick and Connie, which are the names of his parents. Robert Langdon's editor Jonas Faukman, is named after Brown's real life editor Jason Kaufman. Brown also said that characters were based on a New Hampshire librarian, and a French teacher at Exeter, Andre Vernet. Cardinal Aldo Baggia, in Angels and Demons, is named after Aldo Baggia, instructor of modern languages at Phillips Exeter Academy.

In interviews, Brown has said that his wife is an art historian and painter. When they met, she was the Director of Artistic Development at the National Academy for Songwriters in Los Angeles. During the 2006 lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement in The Da Vinci Code, information was introduced at trial which showed that Blythe did indeed do a great deal of research for the book.^[11] In one article, she was described as "chief researcher".^[12]

[edit] Film adaptations

In 2006, Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code was released as a film by Columbia Pictures, with director Ron Howard; the film starred Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Audrey Tautou as Sophie Neveu and Sir Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing. It was much anticipated and served to launch the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, though it received overall poor reviews. It currently has a 24% rating at the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, derived from 165 negative reviews of the 214 counted.^[13] It was later listed as one of the worst films of 2006 on Ebert & Roeper,^[14] but also the second highest grossing film of the year, pulling in $750 million USD worldwide.^[15] Brown was listed as one of the executive producers of the film The Da Vinci Code, and also created additional codes for the film. One of his songs, "Phiano", which Brown wrote and performed, was listed as part of the film's soundtrack. In the film, Brown and his wife can be seen in the background of one of the early book signing scenes.

The next film, Angels & Demons, was released on May 15, 2009, with Howard and Hanks returning.

[edit] Copyright infringement cases

In August 2005, Brown won a court case in New York against author Lewis Perdue over charges of plagiarism, on the basis of claimed similarity between The Da Vinci Code and his novels, The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter of God (2000). Judge George Daniels said, in part: "A reasonable average lay observer would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter of God".^[16]

In April 2006, Brown won a copyright infringement case brought by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed that Brown stole ideas from their 1982 pseudohistory book Holy Blood Holy Grail for his 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. It was in the book Holy Blood Holy Grail that Baigent, Leigh, and co-author Henry Lincoln had advanced the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had a child and that the bloodline continues to this day. Brown even alluded to the two authors' names in his book. Leigh Teabing, a lead character in both the novel and the film, uses Leigh's name as the first name, and anagrammatically derives his last name from Baigent's. Mr Justice Peter Smith found in Brown's favor in the case, and as a private amusement, embedded his own Smithy code in the written judgment.^[17]

On March 28, 2007, Brown's publisher, Random House, won an appeal copyright infringement case. The Court of Appeal of England and Wales rejected the efforts from Baigent and Leigh, who became liable for paying legal expenses of nearly $6 million USD.^[18] A contributing factor for the outcome of the case is that these authors presented their work as nonfiction. Fiction writers often draw upon nonfiction resources for content research.

[edit] Planned works

Brown's new novel featuring Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol, is scheduled for release on September 15, 2009.^[19] The book will reportedly take place in Washington D.C. over a period of 12 hours, and feature the society of the Freemasons.

Brown's promotional website states that puzzles hidden in the book jacket of The Da Vinci Code, including two references to the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, give hints about the sequel. This repeats a theme from some of Brown's earlier work. For example, a puzzle at the end of the book Deception Point decrypts to the message, "The Da Vinci Code will surface."^[4]

Brown has stated that he has ideas for about 12 future books featuring Robert Langdon.^[20]

[edit] Personal life

In a statement at trial in March 2006, Brown wrote that while he was growing up, on birthdays and Christmas, he and his siblings were led on elaborate treasure hunts to find their gifts, following cryptic clues and codes left by their father. This is the same event that he used to describe the fictional childhood of Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code.

Brown plays tennis, and does his writing in his loft, often getting up at 4 a.m. to work. He keeps an antique hourglass on his desk, to remind himself to take breaks. He has also told fans that he uses inversion therapy to help with writer's block. He uses gravity boots and says, "hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective."^[21] He is a 1986 graduate of Amherst College.^[22]

[edit] Philanthropy

In October 2004, Brown and his siblings donated US$2.2 million to Phillips Exeter Academy in honor of their father, to set up the "Richard G. Brown Technology Endowment," to help "provide computers and high-tech equipment for students in need."^[23]

[edit] Criticism

Much criticism centers on Brown's claim found in the preface to The Da Vinci Code that the novel is based on fact in relation to Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion and that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in [the] novel are accurate".^[24][25]

Similar criticisms have been levelled at Angels & Demons, which contains numerous errors in sections described by Brown as "research-intensive" and "entirely factual".^[26]

[edit] Works

[edit] CDs

• SynthAnimals, a children's album
• Perspective, 1990, Dalliance. Music CD
• Dan Brown, 1993, DBG Records
• Angels & Demons, 1994, DBG Records
• Musica Animalia, 2003, a children's CD comprising 15 tracks songs portraying animals in poem & song. Proceeds benefited for the Families First charity.^[27]

[edit] Humor writing

• 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman, 1995, Berkley Publishing Group (co-written with his wife under the pseudonym Danielle Brown). ISBN 0-425-14783-5, Scheduled for re-release in August 2006
• The Bald Book, 1998, co-written with his wife Blythe Brown. ISBN 0-7860-0519-X

[edit] Novels

• Digital Fortress, 1998
• Angels & Demons, 2000
• Deception Point, 2001
• The Da Vinci Code, 2003
• The Lost Symbol, 2009

[edit] Films

• The Da Vinci Code, 2006
• Angels & Demons, 2009

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dan Brown

• Dan Brown Official Website
• Dan Brown Official UK Website
• Dan Brown Official Australian Website
• Dan Brown Unofficial Danish Website
• Dan Brown entry at nndb.com - Notable Name Database
• The Dan Brown Code - In a court filing, the best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code reveals all the secrets of a pulp novelist.
• Summary of Judgement - April 7, 2006, Court's ruling on copyright infringement of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail"
• Dan Brown at the Internet Book List
• Works by or about Dan Brown in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• MP3 excerpts of Brown's CDs, at Rogak's website
• Review of Brown's work by Earl Doherty, a comparative study of Robert M. Price's The Da Vinci Fraud, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Ki Longfellow's The Secret Magdalene.

v • d • e Works by Dan Brown Novels Digital Fortress (1998) • Angels & Demons (2000) • Deception Point (2001) • The Da Vinci Code (2003) • The Lost Symbol (2009) Film adaptations The Da Vinci Code (2006) • Angels & Demons (2009) CDs Musica Animalia (2003) Related articles The Da Vinci Code (soundtrack) • The Da Vinci Code (video game) • Robert Langdon