Dan Brown facts - 10 things

you need to know about

the Lost Symbol author
As Dan Brown launches his hotly anticipated new novel The Lost Symbol, we take a
close look at the phenomenally successful author and dig out 10 facts you (probably)
didn’t know about him.

1. Dan Brown and his wife appear briefly as extras in the 2005 John Travolta and Uma
Thurman film Be Cool. They can both be seen in the front row of the audience during the
a scene filmed at an Aerosmith concert

2. Before becoming a writer Brown tried his hand at music and released a handful of
albums, including 1993’s Dan Brown, and a religiously themed record called Angels &
Demons, a title he would later use for one of his books

3. Salman Rushdie described Brown’s breakthrough book The Da Vinci Code as a “book
so bad it makes bad books look good”

4. Actor Stellan Skarsgard, who appeared in the film adaptation of Angels & Demons, is
also scathing of Brown’s work. “I think Dan Brown is a terribly bad writer, but he has
cliffhangers after every chapter which makes you continue reading,” he said. "It’s like
eating peanuts at a bar. You don't like them, but you keep on eating them anyway.”

5. In 2005 Brown was listed in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year

6. The same year it was estimated that he earned $76.5 million from his writing

7. In 2004, all four of Dan Brown's novels featured in the New York Times Best Seller
List in the same week

8. In 1998 Brown and his wife published The Bald Book, a ‘hilarious and heartwarming
collection of drawings and captions celebrating baldness’. Credited to his wife Blythe,
who also did the book’s illustrations, it is widely accepted to have been written by Dan
Brown. The couple, writing under the pseudonym Danielle Brown, also wrote another
‘humour’ book 187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman

9. Despite being a novelist Dan Brown claims to hate novels. “One of the reasons I don’t
read fiction,” he claims, “is because I can’t really get through it.”

10. Brown is a fan of hanging upside down like a bat. He keeps gravity boots in his office
and helps to cure writers’ block by putting them on. “Hanging upside down seems to help
me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective,” he said