Anne Rice

October 4, 1941: Born Howard Allen O'Brien to Katherine and Howard O'Brien in Mercy Hospital, New Orleans. She hated her birth name and on her very first day at school, she blurted out "Anne" when a nun asked what her name was.

July 1956: Mother dies.

Late 1957: Father remarries.

1958: Family moves to Richardson, Texas. She meets future husband Stan Rice at high school in journalism class. Late summer that year they begin dating.

1959: Graduates from high school. In the Fall she attends Texas Woman's College in Denton.

October 14, 1961: She marries Stan Rice in Texas.

1962: She and Stan move to San Francisco.

1964: Rice earns bachelors degree in Political Science and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

1965: Publishes first short story, "October 4, 1948", in Transfer.

1966: Finds out she is pregnant.

September 21, 1966: Daughter Michele is born.

1969: The Rices move to Berkeley. Writes short story version of Interview With The Vampire. Also writes the novella "Katherine and Jean."

1970: Daughter Michele is diagnosed with leukemia.

August 5, 1972: After a long battle with leukemia, Michele dies.

1973: In five weeks she turns the short story "Interview With the Vampire" into a novel.

1974: Attends a writer's conference in Squaw Valley and meets her future agent Phyllis Seidel. Interview with the Vampire is sold to Knopf.

1976: Interiew With a Vampire is published and gets varied reviews.

March 11, 1979: Gives birth to Christopher Rice. The Feast of All Saints is published.

1982: Cry to Heaven is published.

1983: Under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, Rice publishes The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, an erotic version of Sleeping Beauty.

1984: A.N. Roquelaure's publishes her second novel, Beauty's Punishment.

1985: Under the pen name Anne Rampling, she publishes the erotic tale Exit to Eden. The same year, she publishes Beauty's Release as A.N. Roquelaure and The Vampire Lestat as Anne Rice.

1986: Anne Rampling publishes Belinda.

1988: Queen of the Damned is published.

1989: She moves back to New Orleans and buys a house at 1239 First Street in the Garden District. The Mummy is published.

1990: The first of the witch chronicles, The Witching Hour, is published.

1992: The Tale of the Body Thief, fourth installment in the vampire seriers, is published.

1993: Lasher, part of the witch series, is published.

1994: Taltos, the last of the witch series, is published.

October: The movie version of Exit to Eden is released.

November: Movie version of Interview With the Vampire is released.

1995: Memnoch the Devil, part of the vampire series, is published.

1996: The Servant of the Bones, part of a ghost theme series that isn't connected, is published.

1997: Violen, last of the ghost series, is published.

1998: The Vampire Armand continues the vampire tradition and is published. A new vampire series is born through Pandora.

December 1998: It is discovered after she goes into diabetic coma that she has diabetes mellitus.

1999: The new vampire series signs off with Vittorio.

2000: Yet another vampire book, Merrick, is published.

2001: Blood and Gold, part of the vampire series, is published.

2002: Blackwood Farm, part of the vampire series, is published.

December 9, 2002: Her husband, Stan Rice, dies.

2003: Blood Canticle, part of the vampire series, is published.

January 15, 2003: Her weight reaches 250 pounds due to depression over her husband's death. Due to weight-related health problems, she undergoes gastric bypass surgery.

Jan. 20, 2004: Announces she is leaving New Orleans.

2005: Rice moves to Paradise West, California. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is to be published.

Aug. 30, 2005: Hurricane Katrina devastates Rice's native New Orleans.

Sept. 4, 2005: Anne Rice publishes and editorial in the New York Times about Hurricane Katrina called, "Do You Really Know What it Means to Lose New Orleans?" She writes, "You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music," she continued. "Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us 'Sin City,' and turned your backs."