Dan Brown

Dan Brown is an American thriller writer whose Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons combined religious conspiracy and breakneck plotting to become global publishing phenomena.

Dan Brown spent years as a struggling musician and teacher before publishing his first novels to modest success. The Da Vinci Code, released in 2003, became one of the best-selling novels of all time — a thriller in which Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon races through Paris, London, and Scotland uncovering a conspiracy involving the Catholic Church, the Holy Grail, and the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Angels and Demons, published earlier but now usually read after The Da Vinci Code, sends Langdon to the Vatican to prevent an antimatter bomb from destroying the city while unraveling a battle between science and religion.

Brown’s strengths are his plotting mechanics: short chapters that end on cliffhangers, a constant stream of revelations, and a gift for embedding genuine art historical and architectural detail into his chase sequences. The books are genuinely hard to put down, and whatever literary critics say about them, the experience of reading them is purposeful and compulsive. Angels and Demons in particular benefits from a propulsive structure and a slightly more coherent conspiracy than its more famous successor.

The criticism is substantial and fair: Brown’s prose is often clunky, his characters are thin, his female leads are defined primarily by their relationship to Langdon, and his “facts” have been debunked repeatedly by historians and scientists. Several academics published entire books correcting the errors in The Da Vinci Code. Reading Brown requires accepting a kind of contract: suspend intellectual scrutiny and enjoy the ride. For millions of readers worldwide, that contract has been more than worth it.