• Faith: Christian
• Career: Author
• Birthday:  October 04, 1941
• Date of Death:  December 11, 2021

Anne Rice was an author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature. She was best known for her series of novels called The Vampire Chronicles, of which the first book became the subject of a movie adaptation, "Interview with the Vampire." Rice's books have sold over 100 million copies, making her one of the best-selling authors of modern times. Reactions to her early works were initially mixed, but she gained a better reception from critics in the 1980s.

Literary commentators have analyzed the literary content of her works and writing style. Rice was married to painter and poet Stan Rice for 41 years, from 1961 until his death from brain cancer in 2002 at 60 years old. She and Stan had two children, Michele, who died from leukemia at 5 years old and Christopher, who's also an author. In addition to her vampire novels, Rice also wrote books like The Feast of All Saints, which was adapted for television in 2001 and Servant of the Bones, which formed the foundation of a 2011 comic book miniseries. Several books from The Vampire Chronicles have been adapted as comics and manga by various publishers.

Rice also wrote erotic fiction under the pen names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure, including Exit to Eden, which was later adapted into a 1994 film. Rice was born in New Orleans and spent much of her early life there before moving to Texas and later to San Francisco. She started her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire while living in California, and she started writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s.

What religion was Anne Rice?

Rice was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. In the mid-2000s, after a publicized return to Catholicism, she published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of specific incidents in the life of Jesus Christ. Several years later, Rice distanced herself from organized Christianity, citing disagreement with the Catholic Church's stances on social issues, but pledged that her faith in God remained "central to her life."

On July 28, 2010, Rice wrote of her disdain for the state of Christianity on Facebook, saying, "Today, I quit being a Christian. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

Shortly after, she clarified her statement, saying, "My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become." Rice died from complications of a stroke on December 11, 2021, at 80 years old.