Anne Rice
Anne Rice was an American author of Gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Bible fiction. She is best known for writing The Vampire Chronicles. She later adapted the first volume in the series into a commercially successful eponymous film, Interview with the Vampire.
Born in New Orleans, Rice spent much of her early life in the city before moving to Texas, and later to San Francisco. She was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. She began her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire, while living in California, and began writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, following a publicized return to Catholicism, she published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of certain incidents in the life of Jesus. Several years later she distanced herself from organized Christianity, while remaining devoted to Jesus. She later considered herself a secular humanist.
Rice's books have sold over 100 million copies, making her one of the best-selling authors of modern times. While reaction to her early works was initially mixed, she gained a better reception with critics in the 1980s. Her writing style and the literary content of her works have been analyzed by literary commentators. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice for 41 years, from 1961 until his death from brain cancer in 2002 at age 60. She and Stan had two children, Michele, who died of leukemia at age five, and Christopher, who is also an author.
Rice also wrote books such as The Feast of All Saints and Servant of the Bones, which formed the basis of a 2011 comic book miniseries. Several books from The Vampire Chronicles have been adapted as comics and manga by various publishers. She authored erotic fiction under the pen names Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure, including Exit to Eden, which was later adapted into a 1994 film.
Early life
New Orleans and Texas
Born in New Orleans on October 4, 1941, Howard Allen Frances O'Brien was the second of four daughters of parents of Irish Catholic descent, Howard O'Brien and Katherine "Kay" Allen O'Brien. Her father, a naval veteran of World War II and lifelong resident of New Orleans, worked as a personnel executive for the U.S. Postal Service and authored one novel, The Impulsive Imp, which was published posthumously. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, later became an author of fantasy and historical romance novels.Rice spent most of her youth in New Orleans, which forms the backdrop against which many of her works are set. She and her family lived in the rented home of her maternal grandmother, Alice Allen, known as "Mamma Allen", at 2301 St. Charles Avenue, the city's best real estate, which runs parallel and just five blocks from Magazine Street, the central artery of the Irish Channel, which Rice said was widely considered a "Catholic Ghetto," illustrating New Orleans' historical juxtaposing rich and poor, and black and white neighborhoods. Allen, who began working as a domestic worker shortly after separating from her alcoholic husband, was an important early influence in Rice's life, keeping the family and household together as Rice's mother sank deeper into alcoholism. Allen died in 1949, but the O'Briens remained in her home until 1956, when they moved to 2524 St. Charles Avenue, a former rectory, convent, and school owned by the parish, to be closer to both the church and support for Katherine's addiction. As a young child, Rice studied at St. Alphonsus School, a Catholic institution previously attended by her father.
About her male given names, Rice said:
According to the authorized biography Prism of the Night, by Katherine Ramsland, Rice's father was the source of his daughter's birth name: "Thinking back to the days when his own name had been associated with girls, and perhaps in an effort to give it away, Howard named the little girl Howard Allen Frances O'Brien." Rice became "Anne" on her first day of school, when a nun asked her what her name was. She told the nun "Anne", which she considered a pretty name. Her mother, who was with her, let it go without correcting her, knowing how self-conscious her daughter was of her real name. From that day on, everyone she knew addressed her as "Anne", and her name was legally changed in 1947. Rice was confirmed in the Catholic Church when she was twelve years old and took the full name Howard Allen Frances Alphonsus Liguori O'Brien, adding the names of a saint and of an aunt, who was a nun. She said: "I was honored to have my aunt's name, but it was my burden and joy as a child to have strange names".
When Rice was 15 years old, her mother died as a result of alcoholism. Soon afterward, she and her sisters were placed by their father in St. Joseph Academy. Rice described St. Joseph's as "something out of Jane Eyre... a dilapidated, awful, medieval type of place. I really hated it and wanted to leave. I felt betrayed by my father."
In November 1957, Rice's father married Dorothy Van Bever. On the subject of the couple's first meeting, Rice recalled, "My father wrote her a formal letter inviting her to lunch which I hand-delivered to her house... I was so nervous. In the note he enclosed a pin which she was to wear if she accepted the invitation. The next day she had the pin on." In 1958, when Rice was sixteen, her father moved the family to north Texas, purchasing their first home in Richardson. Rice first met her future husband, Stan Rice, in a journalism class while they were both students at Richardson High School.
San Francisco and Berkeley
Graduating from Richardson High in 1959, Rice completed her first year at Texas Woman's University in Denton and transferred to North Texas State College for her second year. She dropped out when she ran out of money and was unable to find employment. Soon after, she moved to San Francisco and stayed with the family of a friend until she found work as an insurance claims processor. She persuaded her former roommate from Texas Woman's University, Ginny Mathis, to join her, and they found an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. Mathis acquired a job at the same insurance company as Rice. Soon after, they began taking night courses at University of San Francisco, an all-male Jesuit school that allowed women to take classes at night. For Easter vacation Anne returned home to Texas, rekindling her relationship with Stan Rice. After her return to San Francisco, Stan Rice came for a week-long visit during the summer break. He returned to Texas, Rice moved back in with the Percys, and Mathis left San Francisco in August to enroll in a nursing program in Oklahoma. Some time later, Anne received a special delivery letter from Stan Rice asking her to marry him. They married on October 14, 1961, in Denton, Texas, soon after she turned 20 years old, and when he was just weeks from his 19th birthday.The Rices moved back to San Francisco in 1962, experiencing the birth of the hippie movement firsthand as they lived in the Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley, and later the Castro District. "I'm a totally conservative person", she later told The New York Times: "In the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square." Rice attended San Francisco State University and obtained a B.A. in political science in 1964. Their daughter Michele, later nicknamed "Mouse", was born to the couple on September 21, 1966, and Rice later interrupted her graduate studies at SFSU to become a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She soon became disenchanted with the emphasis on literary criticism and the language requirements. In her words: "I wanted to be a writer, not a literature student."
Rice returned to San Francisco State in 1970 to finish her studies in creative writing and graduated with an M.A. in 1972. Stan Rice became an instructor at San Francisco State shortly after receiving his own M.A. in creative writing from the institution, and later chaired the creative writing department before retiring in 1988. Her daughter was diagnosed with acute granulocytic leukemia in 1970, while Rice was still in the graduate program. Rice later described having a prophetic dream—months before Michele became ill—that her daughter was dying from "something wrong with her blood". Michele died in 1972, shortly before she would have turned six.
Rice's son Christopher was born in Berkeley, California, in 1978; he has become a best-selling author in his own right, publishing his first novel at the age of 22. Rice, an admitted alcoholic, and her husband, Stan Rice, quit drinking in mid-1979 so their son would not have the life that she had as a child. In 2008, Rice posted a YouTube video to celebrate 28 years of her sobriety.
Writing career
Influences
Rice cited Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, John Milton, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, and Stephen King as influences on her work. She repeatedly returned to King's Firestarter for inspiration: "I study the novel Firestarter whenever I'm blocked. Reading the first few pages of Firestarter helps to get me going."''Interview with the Vampire''
In 1973, while still grieving the loss of her daughter, Rice took a previously written short story and turned it into her first novel, the bestselling Interview with the Vampire. She based her vampires on Gloria Holden's character in Dracula's Daughter: "It established to me what vampires were—these elegant, tragic, sensitive people. I was really just going with that feeling when writing Interview With the Vampire. I didn't do a lot of research." After completing the novel and following many rejections from publishers, Rice developed obsessive–compulsive disorder. She became obsessed with germs, thinking that she contaminated everything she touched, engaged in frequent and obsessive hand washing and obsessively checked locks on windows and doors. Of this period, Rice says, "What you see when you're in that state is every single flaw in our hygiene and you can't control it and you go crazy."In August 1974, after a year of therapy for her OCD, Rice attended the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference at Olympic Valley, conducted by writer Ray Nelson. While at the conference, Rice met her future literary agent, Phyllis Seidel. In October 1974, Seidel sold the publishing rights to Interview with the Vampire to Alfred A. Knopf for a $12,000 advance of the hardcover rights, at a time when most new authors were receiving $2,000 advances. Interview with the Vampire was published in May 1976. In 1977, the Rices traveled to both Europe and Egypt for the first time.