Anne Rice, born in 1941, American writer, known for her best-selling novels about the supernatural. Rice was born Howard Allen O'Brien in New Orleans, Louisiana, but in her youth she changed her first name to Anne. She married Stan Rice in 1961 and was educated at Texas Woman's University, San Francisco State College, and the University of California at Berkeley.

In Rice's first novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976; motion picture, 1994), a vampire tells his life story to a boy, thereby introducing the reader to vampire history and culture. The book begins a saga of vampires that continues in several other books, which together constitute the Vampire Chronicles, a series noted for its sympathetic portrayal of vampires as romantic individuals who live outside mainstream society. The other Vampire Chronicles books include The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), and The Vampire Armand (1998). These novels are told from the point of view of vampires rather than that of victims. Through graphically described scenes, Rice's supernatural characters search for their own identities in a vampire subculture in which death and sexuality are often intertwined. The Vampire Chronicles books also draw on such themes as homoeroticism, atheism, immortality, and the essential nature of good and evil. Rice began a second series of vampire stories in 1998. This second series included Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires (1999) and Vittorio the Vampire (1999).

Rice's books have also been published under two pseudonyms. Under the name Anne Rampling she wrote the mainstream romance novels Exit to Eden (1985) and Belinda (1986). She used the name A. N. Roquelaure for three books of erotica: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty's Punishment (1984), and Beauty's Release (1985). Rice's other books published under her own name include the historical novels The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1982), as well as The Mummy, Or Ramses the Damned (1989), The Witching Hour (1990), Lasher (1993), Taltos: Lives of the Mayfair Witches (1994), and Violin (1997), all of which deal with aspects of the supernatural.