Dan Brown, A Renowned Thriller Novel Writer

Dan Brown, full name Daniel Gerhard Brown is an American writer. He was best known for the Robert Langdon series which included The Da Vinci Code (2003). The author is mostly renowned for his thriller novels featuring themes of cryptography, art and conspiracy theories. The genres of his books are thriller, adventure, mystery, conspiracy.

His notable works are Digital Fortress, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, Inferno, Origin. His books have been translated into 57 languages. Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and Inferno have been adapted into films.

Early Life

Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire. He has a younger sister, Valerie and brother, Gregory. He went to Exeter’s public school until the ninth grade. He then attended Philips Exeter Academy, where his father was a math teacher. His mother was trained as a church organist and student of sacred music. Brown graduated from Amherst College in 1986. There he played squash, sang in the Amherst Glee Club and was a writing student of Alan Lelchuk.

Career

After graduating from Amherst, he started with a musical career. He produced a children’s cassette which included a collection of tracks such as Happy Frogs and Suzuki Elephants. He made his own record company named Dalliance. In 1990, he self-published a CD named Perspective, which sold a few hundred copies. He used to take classes at Beverly Hills Preparatory School. He also joined the National Academy of Songwriters and there he met his wife, Blythe Newlon. He was also an English teacher at Phillips Exeter and gave Spanish  classes at Lincoln Akerman School to 6th, 7th and 8th graders.

Dan Brown got inspired to become a writer while on a vacation in Tahiti in 1993, after reading Sidney Sheldon’s novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. He started working on Digital Fortress. He co-wrote a book, 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman. In 1996, he quit teaching profession to become a full-time writer. In 1998, Digital Fortress was published. A few months later, he and his wife released The Bald Book. Then he wrote Angels and Demons and Deception Point, released in 2000 and 2001 respectively. In 2003, his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, became a best seller. It went to top of the New York Times Best Seller list. As of 2009, it was one of the most popular books of all time with 81 million copies sold worldwide. In 2005, he was in the Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People of the Year. He was at number 12 on the Forbes magazine’s ”Celebrity 100” list in 2005.

His third novel featuring Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol, released on 2009, got sold over one million on its first day. Inferno, his fourth novel featuring Robert Langdon got released on 2013 and ranked number 1 on New York Times Best Seller list for the first 11 weeks of its release. Origin, Brown’s seventh book and fifth book in his Robert Langdon series was published in 2017.

Personal life

Brown met Blythe Newlon in the National Academy of Songwriters where she was the Academy’s director of Artist Development. She helped Brown with his projects, wrote press releases, set up promotional events. They developed a personal relationship and got married in 1997, at Pea Porridge Pond, near Conway, New Hampshire. He and his wife were supporters of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. However, they got acrimoniously divorced in 2019, after 21 years of marriage.