Dan Brown

Building on the genre popularized by Umberto Eco and James Michener, Dan Brown has set out to create novels that blend fact and fiction in a way that will captivate readers’ imaginations. Where Michener’s works hold strictly to the principal of beginning at the beginning (Hawaii opens with the formation of the islands through volcanic activity), and Eco’s are occasionally bogged down by lengthy exposition involving arcane systems of thought, Brown puts the elements of the thriller ahead of those of the expository work.

Dan Brown dedicates a lot of his time to research and, similar to Michael Crichton, his books touch on controversial issues involving religion, ethics, politics and science. Distilling his findings and tailoring them to the demands of the story, Brown has a demonstrated knack for cranking out page-turners that connect to a broad readership, such as the espionage-packed techno-thriller Digital Fortress. It seems to be a singular fascination of his to point out elephants in the living room and ask the questions no one has thought to ask.

This direct questioning of commonly held tenets has put him and his work in the line of criticism from a variety of vested interests—especially from segments of the Christian population following the popularity of his best-known work The Da Vinci Code. Those who practice a fundamentalist faith have had the harshest comments for Brown, while strict scholars dispute some of the book’s content. Perhaps Dan Brown’s perspective is different from those of most people—after all, his father worked in mathematics while his mother’s profession was entirely spiritual.

He has described The Da Vinci Code as a collation of old ideas designed to entertain print junkies and promote discussion and research on religious topics. It may be that his career as an English teacher following his graduation from Amherst College has made him that brand of writer more interested in questions than in answers.