Dan Brown is the author of the bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. He is the author of three other well researched novels: Digital Fortress, Angels & Demons, and Deception Point. The Da Vinci Code has been on several bestsellers lists including The New York Times, where it debuted at #1. Columbia Pictures has secured film rights to make The Da Vinci Code into a movie. With the success of the book, Dan Brown is quickly moving from cult status to becoming a household word. He has appeared on The Today Show, NPR, and CNN. His novels have been published in dozens of languages all over the globe.
Dan Brown was born and raised in Exeter, New Hampshire. His father, a math professor at Phillips Exeter Academy and his mother, a "professional sacred musician", provided an environment of science and religion. This would support a muse for his novel Angels & Demons which contains settings at the Swiss lab CERN and the capitol of Catholicism, the Vatican. Brown grew up surrounded by books. It was during a vacation one year that he decided to try writing himself.
While relaxing at the beach in Tahiti, Brown happened upon a copy of Sidney Sheldon's, The Doomsday Conspiracy. When he started reading it, he couldn't put it down. Brown had read mostly from the "classics" and found The Conspiracy Theory an easy read and decided he could do something like that. He soon began to write his first book, Digital Fortress.
After graduating from Amherst College, Brown took a position as an English teacher at his alma mater, Phillips Exeter. One day the Secret Service showed up on campus and took a student in for questioning. It turned out the student had the words "kill" and "Clinton" in the same sentence of an e-mail. They wanted to be sure the student wasn't serious about the action stated. The NSA, which intercepts millions of e-mails a day, all in the name of national security, had a "flag" go up on this one and followed up with a formal investigation.
Brown was shocked to discover that an organization of the government, the National Security Agency, was reading people's e-mail. He had never heard of the NSA and discovered that most of the population of the U.S. hadn't either. Thus, the NSA became the major theme of Digital Fortress. Brown did extensive research on Digital Fortress and had to "water down" volumes of technical information to create something the average reader could understand and enjoy. Brown claims he tossed out well over half of what he had written in an effort to "make the book work". He has done the same with The Da Vinci Code, throwing out the equivalent of two or three pages for everyone in the book.
Just as Tom Clancy has the return of Jack Ryan in several of his books, Dan Brown introduces us to Robert Langdon in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Langdon is a Harvard professor who is called upon because of his expertise in symbology. Brown is currently working on a third novel with Robert Langdon as the main character. I have read all of Brown's books and they are all page turners.
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http://www.danbrown.com