Anne Rice

Anne Rice (1941-2021) was an American novelist whose debut, Interview with the Vampire (1976), began the Vampire Chronicles and helped carry her total sales past 100 million copies.

She was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in New Orleans on 4 October 1941 and died in Rancho Mirage, California, on 11 December 2021. Interview with the Vampire grew from a short story of about 30 pages written around 1968 or 1969. She returned to it in 1973, while grieving the death of her young daughter, and expanded it into a novel in roughly five weeks. Alfred A. Knopf bought the hardback rights in 1974 for a $12,000 advance, far above the usual figure for a first novel at the time, and published it in 1976. By 2008 it had sold about 8 million copies, and Neil Jordan's 1994 film starred Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst.

The novel led to a long run of sequels, beginning with The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988). Her Mayfair Witches sequence opened with The Witching Hour (1990) and Lasher (1993). She also wrote the erotic Sleeping Beauty novels as A. N. Roquelaure, and Exit to Eden and Belinda as Anne Rampling.

For collectors. The Knopf first edition of Interview with the Vampire (New York, 1976) is the cornerstone of any Rice collection, since it is both her first book and the start of the Vampire Chronicles. Her Roquelaure and Rampling books were published under those names, so look for them under the pseudonyms rather than as Anne Rice.