Dan Brown: The Unauthorized Biography - Softcover

Rogak, Lisa

3.85

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9781250043320: Dan Brown: The Unauthorized Biography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250043328 ISBN 13: 9781250043320

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013

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The Revealing Story of Dan Brown, the Man Who Outsold the Bible

The Da Vinci Code made Dan Brown one of the most popular authors in history. Yet he's also one of the most secretive, rarely granting interviews or making public appearances.

In this illuminating biography, Lisa Rogak uncovers the life of the high school English teacher and singer/songwriter who became one of the world's bestselling writers. She recounts his bumpy road to publishing success and the legal battle that he fought and won. And she sheds light on the writing process--- and Brown's fascination with puzzles and codes--- that has brought us Digital Fortress, Deception Point, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, and Inferno.

For the first time in paperback, this revised-and-updated biography offers fans a chance to learn more about the author whose novels have captivated millions of readers.

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About the Author:

LISA ROGAK is the author of more than forty books. Her most recent biographies are And Nothing But the Truthiness: The Rise (and Further Rise) of Stephen Colbert, the Edgar- and Anthony-nominated Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, and A Boy Named Shel: The Life and Times of Shel Silverstein. She is also the editor of the New York Times-bestseller Barack Obama in His Own Words.

CHAPTER ONE

OF SECRET CODES AND SECRET SOCIETIES
“I GREW UP in a household where riddles and codes were just part of the way we had fun,” said Dan Brown, recalling his childhood. “On Christmas morning where most kids would find their presents under the tree, my siblings and I might find a treasure map with codes that we would follow from room to room and eventually find our presents hidden somewhere else in the house. So for me, codes have always been fun.
“I also grew up in a house of mathematics, music, and language. And codes and ciphers really are the fusion of all of those languages.”
His mother and father set up the first Christmas morning treasure hunt when Dan was ten years old. Instead of waking to a pile of brightly wrapped presents, he found a poem. While he didn’t disclose what the poem said, he did say the poem provided clues that led Dan and his sister, Valerie, who was only six at the time—their younger brother, Gregory, hadn’t been born yet—to another room in the house. There, he spotted an index card with the letter E scrawled on it along with another poem.
This game continued until he had read four more poems and picked up four more index cards with the letters C, O, P, and T written on them. The poem found with the last index card instructed the siblings that the letters would spell out the name of their Christmas gift when arranged in the correct order.
It didn’t take long for Dan and Valerie to figure out that their present was a trip to Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida. The children loved solving the puzzle, and their parents enjoyed the challenge of planning and designing the treasure hunt so much that the Christmas morning treasure hunt continued as a Brown family tradition until the last child, Gregory, left home in 1993.
When asked if there had ever been a holiday when he and his brother and sister were unable to find a clue or a present, he replied, “Gee, I hope not. I have very kind parents. Eventually they would show us.” But then Brown commented that the first thing he would do the next time he was at his parents’ house would be to look in a closet for any presents they might have missed. Though his comment could have just been a bit of lighthearted banter with his interviewer, it could also point to Brown’s natural suspicions that powerful people—in this case, one’s parents— always keep secrets, and that it would be a great, fun challenge to discover the truth.
* * *
“I grew up surrounded by the clandestine clubs of Ivy League universities, the Masonic lodges of our Founding Fathers, and the hidden hallways of early government power,” said Dan Brown. “New England has a long tradition of elite private clubs, fraternities, and secrecy.”
All you need to know about what makes Dan Brown tick can be found in Exeter, New Hampshire, founded in 1638, a town on the seacoast of the Granite State, where he has spent three-quarters of his life. More specifically, you’d have to look in the halls and people of Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite college preparatory boarding school for grades nine through twelve. It has educated members of the Dupont and Getty families and produced political notables including roommates David Eisenhower and Fred Grandy—whose public visibility began on the 1970s TV show The Love Boat—and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Other writers who attended the Academy include Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Joyce Maynard, Donald Hall, and Booth Tarkington. For centuries, the culture of most New England prep schools has been characterized by a combination of noblesse oblige and elitism so that generations of students at not only Phillips Exeter but also other schools, including Deerfield, Phillips Andover, and Choate Rosemary Hall, graduate with a sense of entitlement and privilege that alone can carry them for the rest of their lives in many cases.
Given his fascination with secret societies and history, and his family’s emphasis on education and love of deciphering codes and puzzles, it’s not at all surprising that Dan Brown chose the subjects for his novels that he has. After all, he not only grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire, but he also was shaped by centuries of the lives of citizens who came before him.
Compare a present-day glance down Water Street—the main drag through town—with scenes of Exeter as shown on postcards from the early twentieth century, and it’s clear that the architecture of the town has changed very little through the years. In fact, many of today’s shopkeepers take pride in the tin ceilings and polished woodwork that hearken back to an earlier, more genteel time.
There are some who would say that the gentility and aggressive pursuit of everything intellectual bred in this refined seacoast town never left. A good part of the reason for this can be attributed to Phillips Exeter Academy, founded a century and a half after the town got its start as a British base for shipping and inland exploration.
But from its earliest days, Exeter forged a “school town” reputation. In fact, the townspeople placed such a high premium on educating their young that the first formal classes for children began in 1640, only two years after the first settlement was carved out of the thickly forested land by the Reverend John Wheelwright in 1638. The town’s emphasis on intellectual pursuits never wavered through the years, and by the early 1800s the town contained a number of schools, ranging from one-room schoolhouses to well-known teaching academies in addition to Phillips Exeter, which by that time had started to admit students from other states.
Like many small towns throughout New England at the time, Exeter had various chapters of fraternal organizations, private clubs, and social groups where businessmen, immigrants, and schoolteachers could network and participate in activities they enjoyed with like-minded citizens. Some of these groups were steeped in history, while others were just informal gatherings; most were segregated by gender. In addition, many of the societies had a public face—often involved in raising money for local charities and the poor—and a private side, replete with special dress, manners of addresses, rituals, and membership initiations that were kept well hidden from the eyes of outsiders.
One of the most popular social organizations in town was the Improved Order of Red Men, a group that had descended from a group called the Sons of Liberty, which dated back to 1765, when it was founded by future Boston Tea Party participants. The national fraternal organization dictated that its members should love and respect the American flag, help others through organized charitable programs, and actively support the democratic way of life while preserving the traditions and history of the United States. Members attended meetings in full Indian costume and headdress; the female counterpart of the group was the Degree of Pocahontas. The Order was popular from Victorian times up through the 1960s; membership hit its peak at a half million in the 1930s, and today is estimated to be around 30,000 nationwide.
Another group in town was known as the Star in the East Lodge, Number 59 of the Free and Accepted Masons Orient, also known as the Freemasons. This lodge was formed in 1857, with the stipulation that meetings be conducted “on Thursday of the week of the full moon.” The Freemasons are still active in Exeter and currently meet on the second floor of the Masonic Hall on Water Street.
Other “secret societies” that have been active in Exeter through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries include the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the St. Albans Royal Arcanum, the Good Templars, and the Knights of Pythias, all groups that Dan Brown has drawn on to some extent in his novels.
An interesting side note: Dan Brown was not the first acclaimed author with the same last name to come from Exeter or to base his characters on people in the town. Alice Brown (1856-1948) was born in nearby Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and was a renowned author of regional fiction, including the works Tiverton Tales and Meadow Grass. She also wrote nonfiction, including a study of Robert Louis Stevenson and a book of travel essays about England. Her play Children of the Earth won her a $10,000 prize in 1914.
Like Dan Brown, Alice Brown was a teacher. She taught school in Exeter for several years at Robinson Seminary, a renowned school for girls in the second half of the nineteenth century. Also like her latter-day counterpart, she left Exeter when she was in her twenties and headed for Boston, where she was able to write full time.
Unlike Dan Brown, however, she never returned to live permanently in New Hampshire, and later in her life, she wrote less and less as popular taste turned away from the regional fare in which she specialized. She stopped writing completely in 1935. It’s unlikely that the two Browns were related.
The acclaimed author of The World According to Garp, John Irving, was born in Exeter and grew up on Front Street, down the block from Dan Brown’s childhood home.
* * *
Phillips Exeter Academy, founded in 1781, is at once ancient—the oldest building, Nathaniel Gilman House, was built in 1735 and predates the Academy—and modern: Its student body currently hails from twenty-nine different countries, the library is state-of-the-art, and the overriding philosophy of the school is to look to the future. Though many boarding schools maintain a campus that is somewhat removed from the main town or city where it is located, Phillips Exeter is unique in that it is right in the middle of downtown Exeter, allowing students to conveniently walk to shops on Water Street or Front Street, and they consider the central community gathering place in town—the Common—to be an extension of the school.
However, like most private New England boarding schools, Phillips Exeter Academy is a world apart from the bustling everyday activity of townsfolk unassociated with the Academy. Essentially, Phillips Exeter is a secret society all its own, where new students quickly learn that the culture is steeped in an Us versus Them mentality. The students and faculty are insiders and people in the rest of the world become, by definition, outsiders. What goes on within its walls is largely unknown and unnoticed by the outsiders, and the insiders like to keep it that way.
This view is almost essential to the strong bonds and active learning that take place at most elite private schools, but the idea of private school as secret society may have been more firmly entrenched in Brown’s spirit than in his fellow students for one simple reason: He spent his entire childhood at the school.
Not only was he a student at the Academy during grades nine through twelve, but he also basically grew up on the campus, since his father, Richard, joined the faculty two years before Dan was born.
Richard G. Brown arrived at the doors of Phillips Exeter Academy in the fall of 1962 as a new teacher of mathematics. He brought his new wife, the former Constance Gerhard, who had trained as a church organist and student of sacred music, with him.
Though Richard had not previously attended the Academy as a student, as was commonly the case for many of his colleagues on the faculty, he realized that Phillips Exeter would provide a free superior education to any children he and his wife would eventually have. So even though Richard began his career at the Academy as an outsider, his children were viewed as insiders from day one.
Together the newlyweds quickly settled into campus life as dorm parents, since faculty members were required to live on campus for the first few years of employment at the school.
The new Mr. and Mrs. Brown didn’t mind in the least. They were eager to become fully involved in the daily life of the school and spend it with students and faculty who shared their love for intelligent conversation and academic pursuits. The Browns wanted to start a family of their own, and their first son, Daniel Gerhard, was born two years later at Exeter Hospital on June 22, 1964, weighing seven pounds and eight ounces. Valerie was born in 1968 followed by Gregory in 1975.
As it turns out, Dan Brown was not the first best-selling author in his family. Richard Brown was the co-author of a best-selling series of mathematics textbooks that became the recommended text in classrooms throughout the United States. Advanced Mathematics: Precalculus with Discrete Mathematics and Data Analysis is still used as a primary text in advanced mathematics coursework. At some point in his career, his work came to the attention of the National Security Agency, and though the then-secret government division actively recruited him, Richard Brown never worked there. He loved his job at the Academy, and though he was flattered by the NSA’s pursuit, he decided he didn’t want to leave teaching or uproot his family.
The Brown family was active on campus, and Richard and Connie encouraged their children to balance educational pursuits and physical activity every day as best they could. At home, however, the overriding activity was intellectual pursuit.
“When I was ten years old, the wondrous author Madeleine L’Engle introduced me to a world of mysticism and adventure,” Brown said in later years. “Her classic, A Wrinkle in Time, was the first book I ever read more than once—four times, to be exact—and her mesmerizing concept of tesseracts got me thinking of our universe in a multidimensional way. I’m certain that the curiosity sparked by this one book played a substantial role in fueling my later interests. Perhaps it was just a function of the right book at the right moment, but never again has a fantasy grabbed me as powerfully as did A Wrinkle in Time. Oddly now, three decades later, I am starting to recapture some of that childhood excitement as similar themes of magic and mysticism work their way into my own books.”
Since Phillips Exeter faculty were required to live on campus for several years before they could move to a house or apartment in town, Dan was immersed in the culture of the Academy from his earliest years, eating most meals in the dining room with his parents, and living in a dorm parent apartment nestled among student dorm rooms.
Dan attended the Exeter public schools until the ninth grade, when he enrolled in Phillips Exeter Academy. By the time he entered his freshman year in the fall of 1978, he had been thoroughly steeped in the culture of this exclusive, ancient college preparatory school, so he thought he had a real advantage over the new arrivals from across the United States and around the world. Dan may have been a faculty brat and his family may have lacked the money that many of his fellow students took for granted, but he knew the culture of Phillips Exeter inside out.
“It was a really great place to be, because there were people there from all over the world,” said Susan Ordway, who attended the school and was a member of Dan’s 1982 graduating class of 250 students.
By the time Dan became a freshman his parents were living off-campus, so he attended classes as a day student. He soon developed a reputation as “an outgoing kind of goofball,” as Ordway described the teenage Dan Brown. “He was very fun to be with. He was quick with a joke and to point out funny things about other people, and didn’t take anything too seriously, which is why I liked spending time with him,” she said.
While boarding students live, eat, and sleep with other boarders and faculty and typically have little exposure with people ou...

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