Daniel Handler tells us that Lemony Snicket was born before you
were, and is likely to die before you as well. His family has roots in a part
of the country which is now underwater, and his childhood was spent in the
relative splendor of the Snicket Villa which has since become a factory, a
fortress and a pharmacy and is now, alas, someone else's villa. To the
untrained eye, Mr. Snicket's hometown would not appear to be filled with
secrets. Untrained eyes have been wrong before.
The aftermath of the scandal was swift, brutal and inaccurately reported in
the periodicals of the day. It is true, however, that Mr. Snicket was stripped
of several awards by the reigning authorities, including Honorable Mention,
the Grey Ribbon and First Runner Up. The High Council reached a convenient if
questionable verdict and Mr. Snicket found himself in exile.
Though his formal training was chiefly in rhetorical analysis, he has spent
the last several eras researching the travails of the Baudelaire orphans. This
project, being published serially by HarperCollins, takes him to the scenes of
numerous crimes, often during the offseason. Eternally pursued and insatiably
inquisitive, a hermit and a nomad, Mr. Snicket wishes you nothing but the
best.
Due to the world-wide web of conspiracy which surrounds him, Mr. Snicket
often communicates with the general public through his representative, Daniel
Handler. Mr. Handler has had a relatively uneventful life, and is the author
of two books for adults, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth,
neither of which are anywhere near as dreadful as Mr. Snicket's. Like Mr.
Snicket, Mr. Handler wishes you nothing but the best.
------------------
Daniel Handler was born in 1970 and brought up in San Francisco, graduating
from Lowell High School. During the early '80s he sang with the San Francisco
Boys Chorus in San Francisco Opera productions such as La Boheme, Carmen
and Tosca.
His parents met at the opera, but his mother is not an opera singer as has been
widely reported due to a misinterpreted joke he made in an early interview.
His mother, Sandra Handler used to be the dean of City College of San Francisco. His father
was a CPA, who fled Germany as a a young boy; Handler says "I knew about the
Holocaust at an earlier age than most people learn about it, I think, and so the
idea that the world could suddenly go very wrong, and that it had no bearing on
what sort of person you were, sunk in pretty early. And it's affected my
politics and my writing and my life."
Handler double-majored in English and American Studies at Wesleyan University,
where he met his wife, Lisa Brown, a graphic designer and writer. They have one
child, Otto, born in 2003.
The pseudonym Lemony Snicket came about when he was researching his first novel,
The Basic Eight, and needed to contact for research purposes some
right-wing political organizations and religious groups, but didn't want his
name to be on their mailing list. When someone asked him his name, out
popped "Lemony Snicket."
When not portraying Snicket, Handler writes novels under his own name. His first novel, The Basic Eight (1999) was
set in an austere academy not unlike his own high school; Watch Your Mouth
followed in 2000, and Adverbs was published in 2006.
When asked to comment on the success of the Lemony Snicket series, Handler says
"I find it mind-boggling.....I think I got lucky -- there's not really a trick
to getting published. Everybody knows how to do it. You find an editor who likes
your work. There are plenty of good things that don't get published and there
are plenty of bad things that do."
Handler says that the Lemony Snicket series is in the gothic tradition of
Wuthering Heights. He also says that the books follow the great Jewish
traditions in that the Baudelaire orphans behave well and bravely because it's
the right thing to do, not because they'll get ahead; as he says "Judaism
doesn't really promise any reward, they just emphasize that good behavior is
more or less its own reward, "
------------------
Brett Helquist was born in Ganado, Arizona, and grew up in Orem, Utah. Soon
after Mr. Helquist’s own dreams of becoming a pirate were sunk, he became an
illustrator and took on the dangerous work of illustrating the New York Times
best-selling Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. He lives in
Brooklyn, where he keeps a very old and mysterious map marked with an "X."
Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket Bibliography:
A Series of Unfortunate Events (with Brett Helquist)
The Bad Beginning (1999)
The Reptile Room (1999)
The Wide Window (1999)
The Miserable Mill (1999)
The Austere Academy (2000)
The Ersatz Elevator (2001)
The Vile Village (2001)
The Hostile Hospital (2001)
The Carnivorous Carnival (2002)
The Slippery Slope (2003)
The Grim Grotto (2004)
The Penultimate Peril (2005)
The End (2006)
The Unauthorized Autobiography (2002) The Blank Book (2004) Behind the Scenes with Count Olaf (2004) The Notorious Notations (2006) The Beatrice Letters (2006)
Various calendars.
Adult Books
The Basic Eight (1999): A darkly comic novel about an
unhinged Jewish school student ("a case-study in narrator unreliability that
unfolds like a Beverly Hills 90210 episode scripted by Nabokov").
Watch Your Mouth (2000): A dysfunctional Jewish
family is terrorized by a Golem.
Adverbs (2006): A series of short stories that
developed into a novel.
He has also contributed to various books, and written a few
short stories. The most recent is an orchestra piece entitled The Composer Is Dead, performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on July 8th 2006, which tells
the story of a murder mystery while introducing young listeners to the
instruments of the orchestra. There are plans to publish it as a book,
accompanied by an audio recording of the orchestra performance.
Copyright 2006 BookBrowse.com
This biography was last updated on 11/05/2006.
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