Anne Rice

Anne Rice was the American author of Gothic fiction whose *The Vampire Chronicles* reshaped the modern vampire genre. She was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien on October 4, 1941, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died on December 11, 2021. Raised Catholic in the city that would permeate her work, she later lived in Texas and California, where she began her professional writing career with *Interview with the Vampire* (1976). Her lush, introspective prose and morally complex characters—most notably the vampire Lestat—drew a devoted readership, and her books have sold over 100 million copies. She adapted the first novel into a commercially successful 1994 film. Beyond the *Vampire Chronicles*, she wrote historical fiction like *The Feast of All Saints* and *Servant of the Bones*, the latter adapted as a 2011 comic miniseries, and erotic fiction under the pen names Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure. In the mid-2000s, after a public return to Catholicism, she published two novels about the life of Jesus, though she later identified as a secular humanist. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice from 1961 until his death in 2002; they had two children. Her works have been adapted into comics, manga, and a critically acclaimed AMC television series.