Dan Brown

American · b. 1964

Dan Brown was an English teacher with three modestly selling thrillers when The Da Vinci Code detonated in 2003 — 80 million copies, official Vatican rebuttals, and a new template for the puzzle-driven blockbuster. His formula of two-page chapters, symbology, and conspiracies hiding in plain art history has made Robert Langdon fiction's most durable code-breaker.