Author Details
Author Details
Snicket, Lemony
"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.
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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 mother, Sandra Handler Day, is an opera singer (his parents met at the opera). His father 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 born in 2003.
When not portraying Snicket, Handler writes novels under his own name. He has just completed his third literary novel, Adverbs, which is due for publication in 2005.. 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.
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, "" he said.
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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."""
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