Back in 2003, a book called The Da Vinci Code arrived not only to become a best-seller and shake the foundations of the Church, but to inaugurate a fever for some letters that delved into a literature full of secrets. A triumph whose credit belongs to a certain American author who has become one of the most multi- selling writers of the millennium. Let’s decipher the riddles through Dan Brown’s biography and best books .
Biography of Dan Brown
Dan Brown.
Born on June 22, 1964 in Exeter, a town in New Hampshire, in the United States, Brown is the son of a mathematician and a composer of sacred music, the perfect combination for an author who would revolutionize Christian circles in the early 2000s. through some enigmas perhaps not so spiritual.
Brown studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and Amherst College, although he also lived for a time in Spain , specifically in the Asturian city of Gijón. He also lived in Seville, where he studied at his university, although its conclave has stated that there are no records of Brown as a student, perhaps because he enrolled in an art history course during the summer. Knowledge that, despite drawing a not so distant future, initially led him to produce recordings of children’s music under the Delliance label .
In 1991 he moved to Hollywood, California, where he continued his career as a pianist while working as an English and Spanish teacher. It was around this time that he met his future wife, Blythe Newlon , who was fifteen years older than Brown. Throughout the first half of the ’90s, Brown continued to record songs and albums, including one under the name Angels & Demons (sound familiar?).
However, Brown’s predilection for literature would come in the summer of 1993 during his stay on a beach in Tahiti. It was there that he would discover the novel The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon , a reading that inspired the future writer to reinvent his career by starting to work on his first novel, The Digital Fortress , a technological thriller that was panned by critics but paid off. with notable commercial success. This first book was followed by Angels and Demons in 2000, a title that presented a certain Robert Langdon obsessed with religious symbology and confronted with the Illuminati sect as the main custodians of some of the darkest secrets in history.
A prelude to the boom that in 2003 would mean The Da Vinci Code , a bestseller that, despite its certain historical errors, managed to shake the Catholic community by alleging facts such as the true nature of the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, the modification of the Gospels or the actual location of the Holy Grail.
A book that caught the eyes of the whole world and was a first general immersion in the bibliography of Dan Brown .
Best Dan Brown Books
The Da Vinci Code
Published in 2003, The Da Vinci Code recounts the alliance between religious symbology professor Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu , the granddaughter of a member of the Illuminati whose murder uncovers the existence of a Holy Grail whose search uncovers many secrets in the history of Christianity based on in a second reading of The Last Supper or an alteration of the story and the events narrated in the Bible. With more than 80 million copies sold , The Da Vinci Code is the most successful of the five-book saga starring Robert Langdon and was adapted for the big screen in 2006 with Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou as protagonists. Despite the numerous criticisms that the book received from both the Church and historians, The Da Vinci Code remains one of the best-selling books in history and a benchmark for a historical literature that experienced a resurgence during the first decade of the century XXI.
Angels and Demons
Although it was published before The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons became a success thanks to the discovery of the 2003 best-seller. Again, Robert Landon stars in this thriller in which he is summoned by a Swiss research center after discovering the corpse of a man with a strange symbol burned into his skin. The first clue of the return of the Illuminati who threaten a bomb that will explode in the heart of the Vatican . The novel, an attempt by Dan Brown to unite two concepts as opposed (or perhaps not so opposed) as science and religion, despite being published in 2000, achieved even greater sales success after the publication of The Da Vinci Code and was adapted to the cinema in 2009 again with Tom Hanks in the role of Langdon.
The Lost Symbol
The third book starring Robert Langdon was published in 2009 becoming the best-selling book in a single day , a sign of the fury that Brown’s work caused in the first decade of the 2000s. Set this time in the United States, more specifically in Washington DC,The Lost Symbol leads Langdon to follow the clues to the Masonic Pyramid buried, according to legend, somewhere in the city.
Digital Fortress
Despite the initial lukewarm reviews (especially due to the setting and description of places in Seville, the city where a large part of the plot takes place), Digital Fortress, Brown’s first book published in 1998, ended up becoming one of the most Famous by Dan Brown . A best-selling novel whose protagonist is Susan Fletcher, a cryptologist from the secret NSA (National Security Agency) who must investigate the meaning of a top-secret code that no system can decipher except for a recently murdered man in Seville.
Deception Point
Published in 2001, Deception Point was Dan Brown’s second novel in which Robert Langdon was not included as a protagonist. In her place we find Rachel Sexton, an intelligence analyst who must unearth the deceptions that surround the appearance of a mysterious space artifact in the Arctic, an event that could favor the victory in the elections of the new president of the United States.
What are your favorite Dan Brown books?
