Dan Brown

Dan Brown (born June 22, 1964, Exeter, New Hampshire, U.S.) is an American author of well-researched novels that center on secret organizations and have intricate plots. He is best known for the Robert Langdon series, which notably includes the hugely popular thriller The Da Vinci Code (2003).

Education and early writing career

Brown attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a New Hampshire prep school where his father was a math teacher, and in 1986 he graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts. He then moved to California to pursue a career as a songwriter. Although he had little success in the music industry, in 1990 he wrote his first book, 187 Men to Avoid, a dating survival guide for women; it was published in 1995.

In 1993 Brown joined the faculty at Exeter as an English and creative-writing teacher. Several years later the U.S. Secret Service visited the school to interview a student who had written an e-mail in which he joked about killing the president. The incident sparked Brown’s interest in covert intelligence agencies, which formed the basis of his first novel, Digital Fortress (1998). Centering on clandestine organizations and code breaking, the novel became a model for Brown’s later works.

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The Robert Langdon series and The Da Vinci Code

In his next novel, Angels & Demons (2000), Brown introduced Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology. The fast-paced thriller follows Langdon’s attempts to protect the Vatican from the Illuminati, a secret society formed during the Renaissance that opposed the Roman Catholic Church. Although the novel received positive reviews, it failed to catch on with readers.

After his third novel, Deception Point (2001), Brown returned to Langdon with The Da Vinci Code, whose plot revolves around art history, Christianity’s origins, and arcane theories. Attempting to solve the murder of the Louvre’s curator, Langdon encounters mysterious organizations (Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion), discusses the hidden messages in Leonardo da Vinci’s art, raises the possibility that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered a child, and discovers the Holy Grail.

The Da Vinci Code was controversial, and many theologians and art scholars dismissed Brown’s notions. The novel, however, proved immensely popular with readers. By 2009 more than 80 million copies had been sold, and editions were available in some 40 languages. Intense interest in the novel resulted in a spate of Code-related books and sparked sales of Brown’s earlier works; in 2004 all four of his novels appeared simultaneously on The New York Times best-seller lists. The film adaptations of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons were released in 2006 and 2009, respectively, with Tom Hanks starring as Langdon. Brown published a young adult version of The Da Vinci Code in 2016.

Brown continued the adventures of his tweedy protagonist in The Lost Symbol (2009; TV series 2021), which focuses on Freemasons, and Inferno (2013), which sees Langdon following clues related to Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy in an effort to stop the release of a plague. The latter book was also adapted for the big screen, in 2016, with Hanks again portraying Langdon. Brown’s fifth installment in the series, Origin, was released the following year.

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In 2025 Brown published the sixth book in the series, The Secret of Secrets. Set mostly in Prague, the novel follows Langdon as he searches for his girlfriend, a neuroscientist who went missing just as she was about to publish some explosive theories about human consciousness.