Anne Rice

American · 1941 to 2021

Born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien on October 4, 1941, in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans, Louisiana, to Howard O'Brien, a postal service executive who also wrote fiction, and Katherine Allen O'Brien, whose bohemian streak led her to give a daughter a man's name in the belief it would carry an advantage in life. The child began calling herself Anne on her first day of school and made the change legal in 1947. Rice was raised Catholic in a household that prized books and imagination; her mother, who had struggled for years with alcoholism, died when Rice was fifteen, and the family later moved to Texas. In 1961 she married the poet Stan Rice in Denton, Texas, and the couple settled in San Francisco, where she eventually earned a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's in creative writing. In August 1972 their five-year-old daughter, Michele, died of leukemia, a loss that plunged Rice into grief and heavy drinking. The following winter, still mourning, she reworked an old short story into a novel in five weeks, giving her invented child vampire Michele's face and her exact birthday. Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, drew mixed reviews at first but became a phenomenon, launching the Vampire Chronicles, which would eventually run to more than a dozen volumes, including The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988), a number one bestseller. In 1998 a diabetic coma brought her back to the Catholic faith she had abandoned at eighteen, a return she wrote into the Christ the Lord novels before publicly renouncing organized religion again in 2010, while insisting her faith in Christ remained intact. Stan Rice died of brain cancer in 2002 after forty-one years of marriage. Rice moved to Rancho Mirage, California, in 2006 and kept writing into her seventies. She died of complications from a stroke on December 11, 2021, at eighty, and was buried beside Stan and Michele in the family mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.