Anne Rice is a widely-read American author whose books have sold nearly 100,000 copies. His subjects ranged from the dark world of vampires, mummies and witches to the blinding splendor of the story of the Son of God walking the earth.
Anna claims that her books reflect the different stages of her spiritual journey, and it has been a remarkable journey. His great wanderings in the physical world are drawn through the vast but contradictory spiritual realms which he has attempted to portray. He recounts the process of his journey in “Called Darkness: A Spiritual Confession” (2008).
But let us go from the beginning.
Howard Allen O’Brien was born into a Roman Catholic Irish family on October 4, 1941, in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was the second of three daughters, whom her mother decided to name after her father.
On the first day of school, Sister asked his name. The girl answered, “Anna,” which she thought sounded pretty, and Anna always was. Her mother, who was with her, said nothing. Perhaps at that time he regretted that he had called his daughter unhappy.
When Anna was fourteen, her mother died of alcoholism. Her father married and moved the family to Richardson, Texas, where Anna enrolled at Richardson High School. Here she met her future husband Stan Rice, although years passed before their mutual attraction blossomed into marriage.
Anne graduated from high school in 1959, and went on to Texas Woman’s University in Denton, and later to Northwestern. Texas State College. She moved to San Francisco, where she claims to be an insurance investigator for a year. Then to Denton, Texas, where in 1961, a high school girl married Stan Rice.
The couple moved to San Francisco. Stan became a professor at San Francisco State, and wrote poems, and Anna wrote the story “Interview with the Vampire” , which would change his life forever. He continued his education and received a master’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1972
Anna and her husband experienced first-hand the hippie culture of the 1960s and lived in the legendary Haight-Ashbury district. Perhaps some ideas have become too far-fetched by the time it has been colored to produce some comments.
In September 1966, Anna gave birth to a baby girl Michael bay. Somehow, Anne was devoted to the study and care of her daughter, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 1970. He was cured, the boy died in 1973, and the next few years were very difficult. Rice’s depression was so severe that many of their days were clouded by alcoholism.
But Anna continued to write. He expanded “Interview with the Vampire” into a novel, and Paramount paid him handsomely for the film rights. With the money, the couple could go to Europe and Egypt. When their son, Christopher, was born in 1977, they put their alcohol problems behind them.
In 1989, Anna bought a house in New Orleans that she passed as a child on her way to church. He wrote several places about his residence and surroundings. The last Vampire books Chronicles “Queen of the Damned” was published in 1989.
In 2002, Stan, Anna’s husband of 41 years, died after a short battle with brain cancer. In 2005, Anna left New Orleans in the months before Hurricane Katrina hit and returned to California to be closer to her son Christopher. He became a novelist in his own right, although unknown to his mother.
After years of declaring herself an atheist, Anna returned to the faith of her childhood. In 2005, he announced in Newsweek magazine that he is now a Christian writer. In the post of one of his fables he calls Christ “… the last supernatural man, the last immortal of all.”
“So I was writing about being away from God, about being lost. The vampire was a perfect metaphor for a lost soul that still hopes, looks for a context, to be part of something, but never found it. And what happened. It was found what my characters were always looking for. They were looking for transcendence and I found a way out of the darkness.
His most recent books were: “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” (2005), and “Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana” (2008). He works in the third volume of “Christ the Lord…”
Reference: AnneRice.com: Anne Rice Biography
Accessed: June 24, 2009
Web site: http://www.annerice.com/Chamber-Biography.html
