Anne Rice was an American author known for horror, gothic fiction and erotic novels. Originally named Howard Allen by her bohemian mother, she adopted the name ‘Anne’ when she started attending school. The daughter of an alcoholic mother, her early life was fraught with difficulties. Growing up in poverty, she did not even have enough money to complete her college education; she found herself a job in order to pay for her night classes. She married early and became a mother, but once again tragedy struck and she lost her child to an illness. The distraught mother sought solace in writing and published her first novel, ‘Interview with the Vampire’. The book became a bestseller, giving her the much needed motivation to move on with life. Plunging into a full-fledged writing, she published two historical novels, ‘The Feast of All Saints’ and ‘Cry to Heaven’, but none of these could match the success of her debut novel. She began to write erotic novels under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure and published ‘The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy’. The trilogy with its explicit sexual content became a huge commercial success, even surpassing the popularity of her first novel. Many of her novels have been adapted into movies and comic books.