Dan Brown

Daniel Gerhard Brown, born June 22, 1964, in Exeter, New Hampshire, is an American writer best known for fast-moving thriller novels built around codes, art, history, and hidden plots. His best-known character is Robert Langdon, whose stories include Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol (2009), Inferno (2013), Origin (2017), and The Secret of Secrets (2025). Brown’s novels often unfold over about 24 hours and use the shape of a treasure hunt, sending readers through symbols, riddles, and old questions about belief and history.

Brown grew up on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father, Richard G. Brown, taught mathematics and wrote textbooks from 1968 until retiring in 1997. His mother, Constance, trained as a church organist and student of sacred music. In that household, numbers, music, language, codes, and ciphers were part of daily life. Brown and his siblings worked on anagrams and crossword puzzles, and their father created elaborate birthday and holiday hunts with clues that led through the house and even around town. One of those childhood hunts later helped inspire Chapter 23 of The Da Vinci Code, and Brown’s relationship with his father informed the bond between Sophie Neveu and Jacques Saunière.

Religion and science also shaped Brown’s imagination. He was raised Episcopalian and was very religious as a child, but in eighth or ninth grade he studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. Questions about the Big Bang and the biblical creation story led him away from religion for a time. Later, he said he had come “full circle,” seeing in science an order and a spiritual aspect. That tension between faith, doubt, evidence, and mystery runs through much of his fiction, especially in the Robert Langdon books, which engage with Christian themes and historical fiction and have generated controversy.

Before becoming widely read as a novelist, Brown studied, taught, and pursued music. He graduated from Phillips Exeter, attended Amherst College, and double majored in English and Spanish, graduating in 1986. He spent time in Spain, including a summer learning Spanish in Gijón and a school year in Seville enrolled in an art history course at the University of Seville. After college he created music with a synthesizer, self-produced recordings, moved to Hollywood in 1991 as a singer-songwriter and pianist, and taught at Beverly Hills Preparatory School. He later returned to New Hampshire, taught English at Phillips Exeter, and gave Spanish classes at Lincoln Akerman School.

Brown’s books have reached a vast readership: as of 2012, they had been translated into 57 languages and sold more than 200 million copies. Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Inferno were adapted into films, while The Lost Symbol became a 2021 television series. He has also written Wild Symphony, a symphonic work paired with a children’s book illustrated by Susan Batori, with music recorded by the Zagreb Festival Orchestra. In 2022, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Weed Road Pictures announced plans to turn it into an animated musical feature film, with Brown writing the screenplay and songs.

Brown’s appeal rests in the way he turns learning into motion. His stories make old buildings, symbols, paintings, and religious disputes feel like clues waiting to be read. He has said his books are not anti-Christian and has described The Da Vinci Code as an entertaining story meant to encourage spiritual discussion and debate. For readers, his words keep their pull because they ask familiar questions in a suspenseful form: what do we know, what do we believe, and what might be hidden in plain sight?