Handler, Daniel

▪ 2002

      Capitalizing on the unsentimental tastes of legions of 10–13-year-old readers, American storyteller Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) captured the imagination of his youthful audiences with A Series of Unfortunate Events. These unhappy morality tales—featuring titillating alliterative titles such as The Reptile Room (1999), The Austere Academy (2000), and The Miserable Mill (2000)—had sold more than one million copies by 2001.

      Handler was born on Feb. 28, 1970, in San Francisco. After earning a B.A. in 1992 from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., he received an Olin fellowship to write a novel, which he discarded upon finishing. He returned to his hometown, worked as an administrative assistant and a writer for a radio program, and, in the meantime, wrote another novel before moving to New York City, where he began reviewing movies and reading manuscripts for a literary agent. His novel was rejected so many times that he began hosting a reading series called “Great Writers Who Can't Get Published.” Shortly thereafter, he appeared on the literary scene with The Basic Eight (1999), a critically acclaimed novel about a high-school student bludgeoned with a croquet mallet wielded by a classmate. Watch Your Mouth (2000), written in the form of an opera, was a satiric work centred on the theme of incest.

      Remembering his youth, Handler had railed against the number of novels devoted to sports or fantasy themes. When urged to turn his hand to creating the kind of books that he would have enjoyed, Handler resurrected Lemony Snicket—a name he had invented when requesting materials from a right-wing organization for a book project—as the doleful narrator and author of the series. The Bad Beginning (1999), which introduced the travails of three orphaned siblings (and also introduced his habit of naming some characters after past literary luminaries, in this case Klaus, Sunny, and Violet Baudelaire), launched the series and established an aura of mystery around Snicket. He was typically featured on the back of the hardcover books as a shadowy figure—his image appearing out of focus or away from the camera.

      Handler deftly served as Snicket's representative at book events, regaling his listeners with the travails of Snicket as well as entertaining them with accordion music and dire tales about danger lurking in the most unlikely places. A favourite story recounted how a bug had bitten Snicket in his armpit and prevented him from appearing. Handler also warned readers not to read or purchase the Snicket books, which feature unhappy beginnings, middles, and endings. Notwithstanding, his fans waited with eager anticipation for each new offering in the projected 13-book series. The latest installments—The Ersatz Elevator, The Vile Village, and The Hostile Hospital—all appeared in 2001.

Karen J. Sparks

* * *