Biography of Anne Rice

In her fiction, Anne Rice (born 1941) seduces her readers through an ornate prose style and a painstaking attention to detail. With her careful blend of accurate historical elements with such themes as alienation and the individual's search for identity, she has acquired a legion of devoted fans.

Anne Rice was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 4, 1941. She was originally named Howard Allen O'Brien (her father's first name was Howard and her mother's maiden name was Allen), but she disliked this name from an early age and it was legally changed when she was seven years old. Rice's father was a postal worker who also worked on sculpture and writing. Rice lost her mother, an alcoholic, when she was fourteen, and the family moved to Texas. Throughout her childhood Rice attended a Catholic church, but abandoned it when she was eighteen because she felt it was too repressive. She married her high school sweetheart, the poet Stan Rice, when she was twenty, and she held a variety of jobs, including cook, waitress, and insurance claims adjuster. She gave birth to a daughter, and wrote sporadically during these years; but when her daughter died of leukemia at the age of five, Rice channeled her grief into her first vampire novel, Interview with the Vampire, which she completed in only six weeks. The book was deemed a success, but Rice's depression was severe enough to cause her and her husband to drink heavily. Though she continued to write, and even completed The Feast of All Saints, their productivity was limited until their son was born. Finally overcoming her alcohol problem, Rice continued to write more vampire novels, as well as several volumes of erotica, and a new series involving a sect of witches in New Orleans.

The success of Interview with a Vampire spurred more vampire books based on secondary characters in her original book; these include The Vampire Lestat,Queen of the Damned,Tale of the Body Thief,Memnoch the Devil, and The Vampire Armand, and Blood and Gold (2001), which follows the life of the vampire Marius from Imperial Rome to Constantinople to Venice during the Renaissance the present day. Under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure, she wrote several volumes of lightly sadistic erotica, including a trilogy based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty.

Although some readers find Rice's subject matter disturbing, others take great interest in her treatment of otherworldly beings. Critics have compared her Vampire Chronicles favorably with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and several have commented on her ability to use language to convey different moods. Many reviewers have said that the popularity of Rice's books lies not only in her skill as a storyteller, but with the lurid fascination readers have with such creatures as vampires, mummies, and witches.

"Anne Rice, a novelist so prolific she needs two pseudonyms--Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure--to distinguish the disparate voices in her books, has won both critical acclaim and a readership of cult proportions," says Bob Summer in Publishers Weekly. Under her own name, Rice crafts novels about the bizarre and the supernatural; under the Rampling pseudonym, she writes contemporary and mainstream fiction; and under the Roquelaure nom de plume she depicts sadomasochistic fantasies. Rice embraces all of her voices now, realizing that each one represents a part of what she perceives as her divided self. In a New York Times interview with Stewart Kellerman, Rice indicates that she's "a divided person with different voices, like an actor playing different roles." She also explains in a Washington Post interview with Sarah Booth Conroy: "I think sometimes that if I had had perhaps a few more genes, or whatever, I would have been truly mad, a multiple personality whose selves didn't recognize each other."

"Anne Rice has been looking for--and inventing--herself all her life," contends Susan Ferraro in New York Times Magazine. "She was named Howard Allen O'Brien--the Howard after her father, even though he didn't much like the name. She hated it. By the time she was in the first grade, she had changed it to Anne." Rice grew up with three sisters in an area of New Orleans called the Irish Channel, which "was, culturally speaking, light-years removed from the aristocratic, mansion-filled Garden District just a few blocks away," write Joyce Wadler and Johnny Greene in People. Imagining what life would be like in these majestic homes, Rice felt like an outsider, as do many of the characters she creates. "She loved the sensuous and sinister streets of her hometown, the shadows of the night, the romance of the St. Charles streetcar, the creepy evening breeze from the Mississippi, the madness of Mardi Gras as the parade passed her porches, the seductive peace behind the whitewashed walls of the Lafayette Cemetery," says Kellerman. Daydreams filled the hours of Rice's childhood, and she developed a vivid imagination. In a Rolling Stone article, Gerri Hirshey points out that Rice "was a fifth grader at the Holy Name of Jesus School when she filled a notebook with her first novel about two kids from Mars who commit suicide."

Rice's storytelling skills have evolved since childhood and are especially evident in her inventive stories, intricate plots, descriptive passages, and vibrant characters. "Growing up in an Irish Catholic family, you hear people using language to the hilt," explains Rice in a Lear's interview with W. Kenneth Holditch. "They dramatize the simplest story: Their timing is perfect, the phrasing has real bite. I heard that kind of language all my life, and with the Irish here in the South you get a double dose of whatever it is that makes for storytelling. Certainly when the alcohol flows and the Irish begin to talk, you can pick up a lot of poetry just by sitting there. Some of us must have a chemical in our heads that causes us to create plots, tell stories, have daydreams. With too much of that you wind up crazy. I think I have just under that amount."

At the age of fourteen, Rice lost her mother to alcoholism; soon after, the family relocated to Texas. She fled from the Catholic Church four years later, and explains to Ferraro: "It struck me as really evil--the idea you could go to hell for French-kissing someone. I just didn't believe it was the one true Church established by Christ to give grace. I didn't believe God existed. I didn't believe Jesus Christ was the Son. I didn't believe one had to be Catholic in order to go to heaven. I didn't believe heaven existed either." Creating an ethical code to replace this lost religious code, Rice suggests in her Lear's interview that "even if we live in a godless world, we can search for love and maintain it and believe it." Emphasizing the importance of ethics, she adds that "we can found a code of morality on ethics rather than outmoded religious concepts. We can base our sexual mores on ethics rather than on religious beliefs."

Rice married her high school sweetheart, poet Stan Rice, at the age of twenty; and despite their ferocious arguments, they are devoted to one another. "I fell completely in love with Stan, and I'm still completely in love with him," declares Rice in her New York Times interview, adding that "it's a passionate, stormy love. The ferocity of our arguments frightens away many people, and our affection for each other inspires them." A year after they were married they moved from Texas to San Francisco, where Rice gave birth to Michele. It was there that she had a prophetic dream: "I dreamed my daughter, Michele, was dying--that there was something wrong with her blood," she recalls in her People interview. Several months later, Michele was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and died shortly before her sixth birthday. "Two years later, her image was reincarnated as the child vampire Claudia in Interview, Anne's first published work," writes Hirshey, noting that like Michele, Claudia is beautiful and blond but is granted eternal life at the age of six. "It was written out of grief, the author says, in five weeks of `white-hot, access-the-subconscious' sessions between 10:00 p.m. and dawn," adds Hirshey.

As its title describes, Interview with the Vampire is the result of an evening in which Louis, the vampire, tells a young man his life story. The novel, which actually began in the late 1960s as a short story, developed into something much larger. "I got to the point where the vampire began describing his brother's death, and the whole thing just exploded! Suddenly, in the guise of Louis, a fantasy figure, I was able to touch the reality that was mine," explains Rice in her Publishers Weekly interview. "It had something to do with growing up in New Orleans, this strange, decadent city full of antebellum houses. It had something to do with my old-guard Catholic background. It had something to do with the tragic loss of my daughter and with the death of my mother when I was fourteen. Through Louis' eyes, everything became accessible. But I didn't ask when I was writing what it meant; I only asked if it felt authentic. There was an intensity--an intensity that's still there when I write about those characters. As long as it is there, I will go on with them. In some way they are a perfect metaphor for me."

Critics are intrigued by Rice's unusual treatment of vampires: "Rice brings a fresh and powerful imagination to the staples of vampire lore; she makes well-worn coffins and crucifixes tell new tales that compose a chillingly original myth," observes Nina Auerbach in the New York Times Book Review. "Because Rice identifies with the vampire instead of the victim (reversing the usual focus), the horror for the reader springs from the realization of the monster within the self," writes Ferraro. "Moreover, Rice's vampires are loquacious philosophers who spend much of eternity debating the nature of good and evil. Trapped in immortality, they suffer human regret. They are lonely, prisoners of circumstance, compulsive sinners, full of self-loathing and doubt. They are, in short, Everyman Eternal." All that separates the vampires from humans and makes them outsiders is their hunt for human blood and indestructible bodies. Presented with flawless, alabaster skin, colorful glinting eyes, and hair that shimmers and seems to take on a life of its own, they are described by H. J. Kirchhoff in a Toronto Globe and Mail review as "romantic figures, super-humanly strong and fast, brilliant and subtle of thought and flamboyant of manner."

Walter Kendrick praises the scope of Interview with the Vampire in the Voice Literary Supplement, saying that "it would have been a notable tour de force even if its characters had been human." Kendrick also suggests that "Rice's most effective accomplishment, though, was to link up sex and fear again." Conroy maintains that "not since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Louisa May Alcott's penny dreadful novelettes has a woman written so strongly about death and sex." Similarly, in a New York Times Book Review article, Leo Braudy observes that "Rice exploits all the sexual elements in [vampire myths] with a firm self-consciousness of their meaning." The sensuous description of Louis' first kill is an example: "I knelt beside the bent, struggling man and, clamping both my hands on his shoulders, I went into his neck. My teeth had only just begun to change, and I had to tear his flesh, not puncture it; but once the wound was made, the blood flowed.... The sucking mesmerized me, the warm struggling of the man was soothing to the tension of my hands; and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart."

When the novel was completed, Rice knew it would be her first published work; many rejection letters later her goal was accomplished. Success was not immediate; Interview with the Vampire did not instantly find its cult audience. When it did, "the book pierced and possessed those who by choice or rejection stand apart from society--heretics, moon worshipers, gays and lovers of the night, the supernatural, the erotic and the exotic," explains Conroy. Gay readers in particular saw the vampires and their relationships as "an original metaphor for gay society--an underworld of the undead that functions within society, yet, of necessity, outside of it," writes Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Richard Panek. Summer asserts that Rice's readership developed by "word-of-mouth" which "pushed the novel into the realm of success." The initial reviews were mixed, though, and sometimes scathing. "What a scope for farce! For satire! For, God help us, whimsey!," exclaims Edith Milton in New Republic, adding that "although one hopes at first that this may all be a hoax, the realization comes at length, painfully, that we are in a serious novel here." However, Village Voice contributor Irma Pascal Heldman suggests that "Rice pulls off her unique tale with a low-key style that is almost mundane in the presentation of the horrific. She has created a preternatural world that parallels the natural one." Adding that "while not for the squeamish," Heldman maintains that "it is spellbinding, eerie, original in conception, and deserving of the popular attention it appears destined to receive." Ferraro remarks that "Rice, who can quote bad reviews years after they have disappeared onto microfilm, refuses to quit."

The Vampire Lestat appeared in 1985, continuing the saga of the vampires. "Goodbye to Dracula, then, to Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and the other caped crusaders," writes Kendrick. "We don't need them anymore, because in Anne Rice's hands, vampires have come of age. They now have a history and a vital new tradition; instead of creeping about in charnel houses, they stand center stage, with a thousand spotlights on them. And they smile straight at the camera, licking without shame their voluptuous lips and white, sharp teeth." In this second novel of the Vampire Chronicles, Lestat, creator of Louis in Interview with the Vampire, awakens from a sleep of many years to find himself in the 1980s. A rock band practicing in a house nearby rouses him, and a few days later, he is dressed in leather and roaring around on a big, black Harley.

The Vampire Lestat assumes the form of an autobiography written as part of the marketing campaign to launch Lestat's new rock and roll career. It takes the reader through "a history of vampirism, from its beginnings in ancient Egypt, through its manifestations in Roman Gaul, Renaissance Italy, pre-Revolutionary Paris and belle epoque New Orleans, and a further discussion of the philosophical, ethical and theological implications of vampirism," writes Kirchhoff, adding that "Rice is a beautiful writer. Her prose glitters and every character in Lestat's dark odyssey is unique. The grimly picaresque tale swoops and veers into vampiric history, anatomy, psychology, politics, mythology, metaphysics and ethics." Although the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani believes that Rice recounts this history "in lugubrious, cliche-ridden sentences that repeat every idea and sentiment a couple or more times," Auerbach finds the novel "ornate and pungently witty," explaining that "in the classic tradition of Gothic fiction, it teases and tantalizes us into accepting its kaleidoscopic world. Even when they annoy us or tell us more than we want to know, its undead characters are utterly alive. Their adventures and frustrations are funny, frightening and surprising at once. Like her own vampires, Anne Rice seems to be at home everywhere. Like them, she makes us believe everything she sees."

Kendrick asserts that "Lestat is more than a sequel to Interview; it's also a prequel and a supplement, swallowing the earlier novel whole." While the novel ends with Lestat's concert in San Francisco, where, scattered throughout the crowd, hundreds of vampires wait to destroy him for revealing secrets and names in his songs and autobiography, The Queen of the Damned, the third book in the "Vampire Chronicles," opens before the concert, with the wrathful vampires plotting Lestat's destruction. He has some supporters, though, among them Akasha, the mother of all vampires and queen of the damned, who has been awakened by Lestat from a several centuries-long sleep. Far from a nurturing character, Akasha wants to bring peace to the world by killing ninety percent of all males and creating a kingdom ruled by women.

A chorus of vampires narrates The Queen of the Damned, and many of the pages are devoted to answering the questions of how and when vampires were created. "Although the events that comprise this prehistory of vampire life are often ludicrous, Rice relates them with authority, verve and a well-developed sense of fun," maintains Kakutani. Conversely, Kendrick believes that the novel is "verbose, sluggish, and boring," and written as if "Rice didn't believe her fantasies anymore." Laurence Coven, in his Los Angeles Times Book Review article, concludes that Rice "provides an exhilarating blend of philosophic questing and pure, wondrous adventure." The last words of The Queen of the Damned predict that "The Vampire Chronicles will continue," leading Rice to resume the series with Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, about a woman of ancient Roman nobility who just happens to be a vampire. Pandora was followed by Vittorio the Vampire, which centers on a teenager in fifteenth-century Tuscany who sets out to avenge his family and falls in love with one of the vampires who preys on the local villages. In Merrick, the most recent volume in the New Vampire series, Rice creates a biracial female vampire who has voodoo powers.

Writing under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, Rice has produced The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, and Beauty's Release: The Continued Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty, which are loosely based on the story of Sleeping Beauty and are described as sadomasochistic pornography by some critics. "A. N. Roquelaure is an S&M pornographer with a shocking penchant for leather collars ... and other kinky bijoux," states Hirshey. Conroy asserts, however, that "despite the content, all is presented with something of the breathless, innocent, gingham-ruffled voice of fairy tales." Rice counters the critical assessment of these works as pornographic in a People interview: "I wrote about the fantasy that interested me personally and that I couldn't find in bookstores. I wanted to create a Disneyland of S&M. Most porno is written by hacks. I meant it to be erotic and nothing else--to turn people on. Sex is good. Nothing about sex is evil or to be ashamed of." Moreover, in a Lear's interview Rice maintains, "they're of high quality ... and I'm very proud that I wrote them."

Writing under the pseudonym Anne Rampling, Rice has written two conventional novels, Exit to Eden and Belinda, which combine erotica and romance. Carolyn See contends in the Los Angeles Times that "Rampling attempts a fascinating middle ground" between the "straight erotica" of Roquelaure, and the "semi-serious literature" of Rice. Exit to Eden tells the story of Lisa Kelly, a gorgeous young woman in skimpy lace and high leather boots who exudes sexuality. Raised by an Irish Catholic family that abhors the idea of sex, she discovers at an early age that she is obsessed by sadomasochism. This obsession, combined with her executive skills, leads Lisa to an island on the Caribbean where she opens the Club--a resort "which is something between a luxury hotel and an S-M brothel," says See. The second half of the novel relates Lisa's exit with Elliott from a lifestyle they once perceived as Edenic. They settle in New Orleans and start dating, proving "that one man and one woman can make a happy life together and be transformed by love, the most seductive fantasy of all," writes See, adding that "`Anne Rampling' makes a lovely case here. Let's take what we've learned of sex and bring it back into the real world, she suggests. It's time, isn't it?"

Belinda is divided into three parts, the first describing the life of Jeremy Walker, a famous author and illustrator of children's books, who lives alone in an old house. Not only is he desperately lonely, but he is also cut off from his sexuality until Belinda comes along. She is a fifteen-year-old runaway who smokes, drinks, and is willing to partake in every erotic fantasy Jeremy concocts. Although Belinda urges him not to search for clues to her past, he does. She runs away and the second part of the novel describes her childhood and her relationship with her mother. The final part of the book contains the search for Belinda and several happy endings--"True love triumphs," claims See in a Los Angeles Times review of Belinda. "Sex is as nice as champagne and friendship, Rampling earnestly instructs us. Value it! Don't be puritanical morons all your life."

During the early 1980s, Rice published two historical novels "of great depth, research and enchantment," remarks Conroy. In The Feast of All Saints, Rice writes about the free people of color, the mulattoes who formed a population of about 18,000 in nineteenth-century Louisiana. The novel centers around the Ferronaire family, focusing on golden-colored Marcel and his sister Marie who could pass for white. Living in the midst of the antebellum South, they are never really a part of it, and the novel examines this discrimination and the choices the characters must make because of it. Penelope Mesic, in her Chicago Tribune Book World review, considers it "an honest book, a gifted book, the substantial execution of a known design," and Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Valerie Miner suggests that "this new book is rare, combining a `real story,' a profound theme and exquisite literary grace."

Cry to Heaven, another historical novel, enters the world of the Italian castrati, famous male sopranos who were castrated as boys so their voices would remain high. Tonio Treschi, the hero, is a Venetian heir whose brother has him abducted, castrated, and exiled from his home. The rest of the novel relates the pursuit of the goals that obsess him--to become one of the best singers in Europe, and to take his revenge on his brother. Alice Hoffman describes Cry to Heaven in a New York Times Book Review article as "bold and erotic, laced with luxury, sexual tension, music," adding that "here passion is all, desires are overwhelming, gender is blurred." Hoffman concludes that "this is a novel dazzling in its darkness, and there are times when Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both."

Rice returned to New Orleans in 1988 and to writing about the supernatural world under her own name. In 1989, she released The Mummy: Or Ramses the Damned, and The Witching Hour soon followed, appearing in 1990. The Mummy tells the story of Ramses the Great who ruled Egypt 3000 years ago. Having taken an elixir that gives him eternal life, Ramses is awakened from his sleep by an Egyptologist who finds his tomb and brings him to London. Although James Blair Lovell, writing in the Washington Post Book World, says The Mummy is "episodic, predictable and, worse, artless," Frank J. Prial, writing in the New York Times Book Review, asserts that "if you liked her vampires, you're going to love her mummies."

Rice uses her large, antebellum mansion in New Orleans as the setting for another novel, The Witching Hour. The mansion in the novel belongs to the Mayfair family and its generations of witches. Rowan, the thirteenth witch, has extrasensory powers and must defend herself from Lasher, the personification of evil. Leading Ferraro through a tour of her home, Rice describes the scenes that took place in each of the rooms: "`There's the fireplace where Rowan and Lasher sat on Christmas morning,' she says matter-of-factly, a smile tugging at her lips.... Up a flight of stairs, to Rice's office, where she ignores the messy desk and points dramatically to an ornate bed--`where Deirdre died,' she says, of another of the book's characters. Up another flight, to her husband's studio. `This is where Stuart Townsend's body lay, you know,' she says, gazing at the floor, her voice pensive."

"What is unnerving about all this is not that Rice switches back and forth between her fictional and factual worlds, but that they seem to coexist, with equal intensity. It is as if she has somehow brought about the haunting of her own house," writes Ferraro. Although Patrick McGrath indicates in the New York Times Book Review that, "despite its tireless narrative energy, despite its relentless inventiveness, the book is bloated, grown to elephantine proportions because more is included than is needed," Susan Isaacs, in her Washington Post Book World review, believes that "Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth. In The Witching Hour, she presents a rich, complicated universe that operates by both natural and supernatural law, and she does so with such consummate skill that halfway through the novel, even the most skeptical reader has no trouble believing in the existence of witches and--yes--in The Man, Lasher, the devil incarnate."

Devils, witches, mummies, vampires, eroticism, and a dash of New Orleans are all parts of Rice's literary creations. Intermingled with these fictional creations are aspects of her personal life--a childhood spent in New Orleans, the loss of her mother and of her daughter, an absence of religious faith, and the feeling of being an outsider. "The passionate energy that infuses Rice's prose is personal," observes Ferraro, and Rice declares in a People interview: "When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Ferraro describes this writing as "florid, both lurid and lyrical, and full of sensuous detail. She supports her fantasies with superb narrative, unabashed eroticism and a queasy but ultimately cathartic indulgence in the forbidden." Even though she puts much of herself into her works, the world in which Rice lives contrasts sharply with the fantasy worlds she creates. "If it is true, as Rice says, that we each wear a cloak of respectability while in our hearts we are all monsters, her cloak is pulled very tightly indeed," write Wadler and Greene. Spending most of her time with her husband and son, Christopher, and the rest writing, Rice seeks immortality through her books. "I want people to carry dog-eared copies of Interview with the Vampire in their backpacks," says Rice in her Lear's interview. "I want my books to live, to be read after I'm dead. That will be justification enough for all the pain and work and struggling and doubt."

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Anne Rice (1941-)
• At the time of Rice's birth:
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the U.S.
• The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor December 7
• Bobby Riggs won men's singles at Forest Hills
• Joseph Kesselring's play, Arsenic and Old Lace, opened at New York's Fulton Theatre
• U.S. population reached 132 million
• The times:
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1983: American invasion of Grenada
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• 1992-1996: Civil war in Bosnia
• Rice's contemporaries:
• Ed Bradley (1941-) American news correspondent
• Placido Domingo (1941-) Spanish opera singer
• Bob Dylan (1941-) American folk singer, musician
• Nora Ephron (1941-) American writer
• Jesse Jackson (1941-) American religious leader, political activist
• Nick Nolte (1941-) American actor
• Otis Redding (1941-1967) American r&b musician, singer
• Anne Tyler (1941-) American writer
• Michael Crichton (1942-) American writer
• Selected world events:
• 1950: E. I. DuPont introduced Orlon
• 1956: Israel invaded Egypt, advanced toward Suez Canal
• 1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech
• 1967: Mike Nichols's film, The Graduate, was released
• 1969: Harvard medical student Michael Crichton published The Andromeda Strain
• 1976: The worst earthquake in modern history hit Tangshan, China, killing 655,000
• 1981: AIDS takes a worldwide toll, causing it to be compared to the Black Death in the 14th century
• 1990: South African resistance leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison
• 1994: O.J. Simpson was charged with killing his ex-wife and a male friend

Further Reading

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 41, Gale, 1987.
• Ramsland, Katherine, Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice, Dutton, 1991.
• Rice, Anne, Interview with the Vampire, Knopf, 1976.
• Rice, Anne, Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, Knopf, 1998.
• Rice, Anne, The Queen of the Damned, Knopf, 1988.
• Book-of-the-Month Club News, December, 1990.
• Chicago Tribune Book World, January 27, 1980; February 10, 1980.
• Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 15, 1986; November 5, 1988.