Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire. His mother was a professional musician who specialized in sacred works, and his father, Richard Brown, was a Presidential Award-winning math teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy. After attending Exeter himself and graduating in 1982, Brown went to Amherst College, where he received a bachelor's degree in English Literature in 1986. He returned to teach at Phillips as an English instructor.

While teaching in 1996, Brown began generating ideas for his first novel when he learned that the U.S. Secret Service had detained one of his students for composing an e-mail message that appeared to threaten the president of the United States. The novel, titled Digital Fortress (1998), explores the tension between privacy and national security. His second novel, Angels and Demons (2000), introduces a character that would become the hero of his future works, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, and concerns...