Abstract
Anne Rice is one of the most famous and successful writers of America who is well known for her works of fiction dealing with supernatural elements combined with elements of history and religion. Born in New Orleans, Anne Rice grew up with strong religious convictions, till her mother’s death in 1956, when she lost her faith. She married Stan Rice, a poet and in 1978 had her first son Christopher and later had a daughter Michelle. Anne tasted success with her book Interview with the Vampire in 1976 which was followed by The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1980). She wrote sexual erotica such as Exit to Eden in 1985 and Belinda in 1986The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which was published in 1983, Beauty’s Punishment in 1984, and Beauty’s Release in 1985. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles was a successful series of eleven novels. Anne Rice returned in to New Orleans during her later years and continued writing. Presently Anne Rice lives in California. Her faith in Christianity has been restored and she now writes books on Jesus Christ.
Introduction
Anne Rice is one of the successful and prolific authors of America who is well known for her epic stories that deal with both real and supernatural worlds. She has written over 28 novels. Her books are rich tapestries of history, belief, philosophy, religion, and compelling characters that force the readers to see beyond the physical world one perceives. The novels of Anne Rice explore the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, each a reflection of her own moral journey. Her works both entertain and challenge readers. What is interesting is that Anne Rice’s immensely popular horror fiction attracts both the academic reader and the general reader with equal ease. Her most popular novels, such as Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Witching Hour (1990), though situated within the gothic narrative tradition, go far beyond the conventions of the formula and explore important contemporary social issues (Hoppenstand and Browne, 1996).
Her Early Days
Anne Rice was born on October 4, 1941, in New Orleans as Howard Allen O’Brien. Her parents gave her this name because they thought it was a powerful name would be an asset to her future. She was baptized at St. Alphonsus Church, the same church which later proved to be the setting in which all the Mayfair witches were baptized in Anne Rice novels. New Orleans gave her both Catholicism and voodoo, a potent inspiration for any beginning writer. She started writing stories very early in school. On her first day of school in 1947, when her teaching nun asked what her name was, she said ‘‘Anne’’ before her mother could reply. Her mother said “If she wants to be Anne, let her be Anne” (Smith, 1996). And Anne she was from that day on. Anne’s mother was a religious woman who was very creative and who encouraged creativity in her children. Anne not only read a lot but she also went to the movies, especially the horror films she loved. When she was nine, she learned about vampires for the first time when she saw the film Dracula’s Daughter.
Due to her strong religious convictions she initially wanted to become a saint but was unsure about the details. She craved the security of the church because there was little security at home and her mother was an alcoholic. Anne continued to write over the next ten years, writing a novella about two aliens from Mars when she was ten, and several plays by the time she was twelve. Everything changed in 1956 when her mother died from alcoholism and Anne was just fourteen. She lost her faith in religion and she had to move to Texas with her father. It was in Texas that she met the love of her life, a boy who worked on the school paper named Stan Rice.
Stan and Anne
Stan recollects Anne as being a bright and vivacious girl. Anne wanted to move to a city where should both go to school and work. In 1960, she moved to San Francisco. It was only when Anne went away that Stan realized how deeply he loved her. They exchanged mails for two years until Stan proposed by a special delivery letter in 1961. They were married in Texas, and Stan returned to San Francisco with Anne so that they could take night courses at the University of San Francisco. They lived in Haight-Ashbury and watched the growth of the hippie movement. This had a tremendous impact on the writings of Anne. Anne wrote her first unpublished novels, The Sufferings of Charlotte and Nicholas and Jean. They graduated in 1964, Anne in political science and Stan in creative writing. Michele was born to them in 1966 (Smith, 1996).
Anne was in graduate school, and Stan was teaching creative writing at San Francisco State University when he won a poetry grand and they moved to Berkeley. Anne wrote another short story, ‘‘Interview with the Vampire,’’ along with the novella Katherine and Jean that would later serve as her master’s thesis. Their lives were perfect till tragedy struck. Little Michelle was diagnosed with leukemia in 1970.
The next two years, the Rices struggled to save Michelle, who succumbed to her disease and died in 1972. In the meantime, Anne managed to finish her degree. Unable to bear the loss of their daughter, both Rices descended into alcoholism, but were able to pull through this drunken period because of their writing. Stan wrote a collection of poems about Michelle’s death called Some Lamb, published in 1975, and Anne with a ground-breaking book about addiction, loss, and despair called Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976 (Smith, 1996).
Anne Rice the Writer
Interview with the Vampire features a narrator who is lost in misery – Louis the vampire who loathes his vampire nature and tries to deny it. The Interview was a great success and brought financial security as well. Interview was only $12,000, the paperback rights sold for $700,000, and the film rights went for $150,000 (Smith, 1996). Stan published another book of poems called Whiteboy and his career got another boost when he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 1978, their son Christopher was born. For the sake of Christopher, both of them gave up drinking.
In 1979, Anne’s second book and first historical novel, The Feast of All Saints, was published. The book was based on New Orleans’ Free People of Color – the freed offspring of African slaves and the French and Spanish traders, many of whom had emigrated from Haiti. While they had their freedom, they had few rights, and belonged neither to white society nor to slaves. Her central character is a four-teen-year-old boy named Marcel who feels like an outsider, caught between two worlds. The book was not a success and Anne was depressed by the reviews and poor sales. In 1980, she followed Feast with another historical novel, Cry to Heaven, setting her story in eighteenth-century Italy and writing about the castrati, the choir boys who were castrated so that their beautiful voices would not deepen in puberty and be ruined. Cry to Heaven was published in 1982, and only the New York Times gave it a favorable review. Anne was disappointed and she began to withdraw.
She chose to experiment with sexual fantasies under pseudonyms, writing two books of erotica, Exit to Eden in 1985 and Belinda in 1986, and three books of erotic fairy tales that explore sadomasochism, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which was published in 1983, Beauty’s Punishment in 1984, and Beauty’s Release in 1985 (Smith, 1996). These books, written under the pseudonyms of Anne Rampling and A. R. Roquelaure, gave Anne a chance to explore areas of human character without being condemned by the critical press.
Anne Rice, even as she was writing these novels, was drawn back to the supernatural, particularly to her vampires. Anne became fascinated with the villain from Interview, the always strong, never surrendering Lestat. In 1985, she published his story, The Vampire Lestat, making him both a rock star and the mythic hero of a biography that spanned more than two hundred years. It soon became a bestseller on the list of the New York Times within two weeks, but critics still missed the point of the vampires as metaphors, labeling her book as a simple horror story (Rinaldi, 1995). Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles is a collection of eleven novels that interrelate and narrate the life stories of a series of vampires (Lopez, 2007).
Moving to New Orleans
In 1987, the Rices moved to a new house, and Anne wrote The Queen of the Damned, a mythology of the vampires tied to the present by a mythic struggle between good and evil in the vampire community. She even used the new house as a model for the vampires’ compound in Queen. The Rices next bought a house in New Orleans in 1988. After the success of The Queen of the Damned they moved to New Orleans permanently, and started to focus on bringing the family together (Smith, 1996).
In New Orleans in 1989, Stan and Anne bought the Garden District Greek Revival house that would become the setting for five or six of Anne’s novels. This house would also house Stan’s attic painting studio. It was here that Christopher wrote his first novel. This home was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for Anne, who had passed the beautiful house frequently in her early years, going to and from her parish church of St. Alphonsus from her home on St. Charles Avenue. It was in their new New Orleans home in 1989 that Stan Rice painted over three hundred paintings in the attic of their Garden District home Anne Rise, during this period tried her hand at screenplay writing, and wrote the script for a mummy movie. When it was not accepted by Hollywood, she made it into a book, The Mummy or Ramses the Damned in 1989 (Smith, 1996). The Mummy is the story of a great king who rises from immortal sleep to save a twentieth-century woman.
Returning home to New Orleans, Anne Rice felt a deep peace and the city inspired her second series, the Witches Chronicles, beginning with the epic of the Mayfair witches, The Witching Hour, which was published in 1990. Lestat then required another book, The Tale of the Body Thief, in 1992, a book in which he finally gets to choose vampirism of his own free will by fighting to get his immortal body back from a psychic thief who has stolen it. In 1993, Anne returned to her witches, publishing Lasher, the story of the demon who has plagued the Mayfair witches and of Rowan, the most powerful witch whom he almost destroys. In 1994, she published Taltos, the history of a supernatural race that is part of the Mayfair legacy. Lestat demanded one final appearance, one in which he argues with God and the Devil, and Memnoch the Devil was published in 1995.
According to critic David Gates, whatever she wrote, Anne Rice continued to tackle the big questions of our time: ‘‘What does it mean to be human, and what does it matter?’’ (Smith, 1996). Rice has spoken of her need to get to the core of meaning, to get closer and closer to the truth, and she has said, ‘‘To write something great, you have to risk making a fool of yourself’’ (Gates, ‘‘Queen,’’ 77).
During the 1990’s, Anne owned many buildings in New Orleans, including St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage, her childhood home on St. Charles Avenue, and other restoration projects.
Her son Christopher Rice
Christopher Rice, who attended school in San Francisco, and later in New Orleans, has published four novels, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. Christopher attended Brown University for one year, and also attended New York University, before writing the first of his novels, A Density of Souls, which brought him national recognition.
Recent Days
The family enjoyed apartments in Florida and New York, and traveled frequently to Europe. Anne and Stan also traveled to Israel. Anne made a second visit in 2005. The 1990’s also saw Anne’s first novel, Interview with the Vampire made into a motion picture, starring Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Cruise. Anne’s screenplay was the basis for the adaptation, directed by Neil Jordan. Years later, Anne’s novel, The Feast of All Saints, about the free people of color of Lousiana, would be made into a Showtime mini-series, scripted by John Wilder. A Broadway musical, Lestat, was also developed in 2004 by Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Linda Woolverton and Rob Roth.
Anne returned to the Catholic Church in 1998, and in 2002 consecrated her writing entirely to Christ, vowing to write for Him or about Him (Annerice.com, 2008). Stan Rice died in 2002 within four and a half months of being diagnosed with brain cancer. His many beautiful paintings will soon find a permanent home in a southern museum. Eventually, his collected poems will be published. His extensive diaries are now being edited. They include many observations about his poetry and his painting (Annerice.com, 2008). Anne says she is reconciled with God and dedicating the rest of her life to writing only for—and about—Jesus Christ. Her first novel of this kind is Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf). The first-person narrative of Jesus as a young boy follows Jesus from His family’s hiding in Egypt back to Jerusalem and Nazareth, where He slowly learns His true identity (Vincent, 2005).
In 2005, after completing Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, Anne left Louisiana and her beloved city of New Orleans to live in California. Within months of her departure, Hurricane Katrina devastated the area. Christ the Lord, the Road to Cana, was published in 2008. A spiritual memoir by Anne entitled Called Out of Darkness will be published in the fall of 2008 as well. Anne now lives and works in the California desert, a few hours drive from her son, Christopher, who lives and works in West Hollywood (Annerice.com, 2008).
Conclusion
Anne Rice is one who stands out among writers of fiction with her vast knowledge of history, religion and voodoo. Her writing style is mainly experimental as can be seen from her books on vampires and books on sadomasochism. She finds fulfillment in life not only as a writer but also in her roles as a wife and mother. Her love and attachment to New Orleans shows that she is a woman whose roots run deep. Overall, when one studies her life, one can easily deduce that Anne Rice is – a great writer, a great woman and a great human being.
Bibliography
(2008). Anne’s Chamber: Biography. Official Website.
Gates, David. ‘‘Queen of the Spellbinders.’’ Newsweek, 1990: 76–77.
Hoppenstand, Gary and Browne, B. Ray (1996). The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Bowling Green, OH.
Lopez, Cortex L. Camille (2007). The New Face of the Vampire: Autobiographical Fiction in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. Web.
Rinaldi, Mark (1995). Lestat’s Last Stake. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Smith, Jennifer (1996). Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press. Westport, CT.
Vincent, Lynn (2005). Into the Light. World Magazine.