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Anne Rice. Anne Rice. The Life of Anne Rice Anne Rice was born on October 4, 1941, in New Orleans, but her name wasn’t Anne then. Instead, her parents named her Howard Allen O’Brien because they thought it was a powerful name that would give her a head start in life. Anne.
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Anne Rice • The Life of Anne Rice • Anne Rice was born on October 4, 1941, in New Orleans, but her name wasn’t Anne then. Instead, her parents named her Howard Allen O’Brien because they thought it was a powerful name that would give her a head start in life.
Anne • She was also showing signs that she was going to surprise people. On her first day of school in 1947, when her teaching nun Sister Hyacinth asked what her name was, she said “Anne” before her mother could say “Howard.” “All right,” her mother said. “If she wants to be Anne, let her be Anne.”
Anne • 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. But then things changed. In 1956, when Anne was fourteen, her mother died from alcoholism, and Anne’s life was never the same.
Anne • Another important change came the next year when Anne’s father moved the family to Texas, away from the New Orleans that Anne loved. However, Texas brought her a new love, a boy who worked on the school paper named Stan Rice.
Anne • 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 until they could enroll in San Francisco University. • Around this time the great event in both Stan and Anne’s life was the birth of their first child, Michele, in 1966.
Anne • By this time, Anne was in graduate school, and Stan was teaching creative writing at San Francisco State University, doing so well with his writing that he won a poetry grant. Around this time Anne started writing Interview with the Vampire. Her life seemed perfect, but in 1970 her daughter, Michelle was diagnosed with leukemia.
Anne • In 1972 Michelle died, for the next two years, both Rices descended into alcoholism spending their days and nights in a drunken haze. Anne published a groundbreaking book about addiction, loss, and despair called Interview with the Vampire in 1976.
Anne • In both Louis and his opponent the vampire Lestat, Anne created fully developed figures with human needs, fears, and questions. She has said that she channels these characters and that they arise full blown in her mind, not developed mechanically as tools on an author, and they are dynamic characters because it, acting instinctively and driven by their needs
Anne • The Feast of All Saints 1979 • Cry to Heaven 1982 • ………. • The Vampire Lestat1985 • The Queen of the Damned 1987 • Lestat required another book, The Tale of the Body Thief, 1992.
Anne • Supernatural Genres: Horror and Gothic • To analyze Anne Rice’s work by genre or kind of fiction, it’s necessary to go all the way back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was then that writers developed a fascination with the modern ideas of the supernatural. These writers, the Romantics, rejected the idea that everything could be explained by science and instead insisted that there were many things unexplained and
Anne • unexplainable, including the individual human spirit. Romantic literature emphasizes strong ties to nature as both wild and true, an acceptance of the supernatural as a real force in life, an appreciation for passion over logic, and a rejection of conventional rules or rituals.
Anne • The Romantics’ fascination with both the importance of the individual and the supernatural led them to explore new areas in the two genres that Anne Rice most often draws on: horror and gothic fiction. But Rice’s similarities to the Romantics go beyond the genres they both write, for Rice is a twentieth-century Romantic writer, a throwback to dreamers such as Coleridge, Keats, and Byron.
Anne • Characters • The vampire Lestat as protagonist, as a being immortal, is struggling to get his body back. • Lestat changes and grows as a dynamic character and reaches the end of the book wiser and more self-aware than ever before.
Anne • The body thief, Raglan James, is a worthy opponent, because he is clever and ruthless, and because he is walking around in Lestat’s deadly, immortal body while Lestat is stuck in a weak, mortal body.
Anne • In contrast, Raglan James, Lestat’s antagonist, is a static character because he does not grow. He begins and ends as the same character, a born thief. • Unlike Raglan James, David Talbot is a dynamic character. As Lestat’s only mortal friend, he stands by him even though he knows Lestat wants to make him a vampire to keep with him forever.
Anne • Questions for Chapter One • How is the city, Miami, described? • What type is his favorite target? • How many people are killed? • How could he get “The Thing on the Doorstep” by H. P. Lovecraft?