Daniel Handler

Author Daniel Handler adopted the nom du plume "Lemony Snicket" to write "A Series of Unfortunate Events," a series of 13 novels that satirized Gothic fiction conventions and earned a global following, as well as a full-blown media empire that included film and television adaptations. Born February 28, 1970 in San Francisco, he was by all accounts an avid and advanced reader from an early age, and was digesting novels for adults prior to his tenure at Lowell High School. He attended Wesleyan University, where he earned the 1992 Connecticut Student Poet Prize for a work he claimed was plagiarized from the Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Bishop. After graduation in 1992, Handler returned to San Francisco, where he wrote several novels that went unpublished and collaborated with the alternative rock band Magnetic Fields on their 1998 album 69 Love Songs (1999) A move to New York City that year preceded the publication of his first book, The Basic Eight (1999), a dark satire of high school life. While working on the publication, he also began to lay the groundwork for a novel for young readers that would reject the traditional themes and storylines. What resulted was The Bad Beginning (1999), the first in a series of adventures, patterned in part after Gothic novels from the Victorian period, featuring a trio of orphans who narrowly avoid certain death at the hands of the malevolent Count Olaf. Handler adopted the pen name "Lemony Snicket," a mysterious figure who served as the book's overly cautious narrator. The book was an international success, and spawned twelve more adventures between 2000 and 2006, as well as several associated novel series, including a quartet which purported to tell Snicket's own back story. To compliment the richly comic fantasy worlds of these works, Handler frequently appeared at media events as Snicket's publicist or representative, furthering the mystery around the "author" through deliberate obfuscation of facts and future projects. Handler also contributed to the screenplay for director Brad Silberling's 2004 film version of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," with Jim Carrey as Count Olaf, but eventually relinquished the job after a change in producers. In addition to his one-man industry as Snicket, Handler also wrote several novels under his own name, including Watch Your Mouth (2000), a black comedy-fantasy, told partly as an opera, about a young man's involvement with a family that delves in sexual aberrance and magic, and young adult novels like Why We Broke Up (2011). He wrote two other film scripts, one for "Rick" (2003), a comedy based on the opera "Rigoletto," and the dark comedy "Kill the Poor" in 2006. In 2017, he teamed with Barry Sonnenfeld to write and produce a television series based on "A Series of Unfortunate Events" for Netflix.