Charlaine Harris, author of Sookie Stackhouse books, is born
On this day in 1951 novelist Charlaine Harris creator of the best-selling Sookie Stackhouse series about a telepathic barmaid and a group of vampires and other supernatural creatures in small-town Louisiana is born in Mississippi.Harris who was raised in Tunica Mississippi graduated from Rhodes College in Tennessee in 1973 with a degree in English.Afterward she worked various jobs as a typesetter before publishing her first novel Sweet and Deadly in 1981.
The book a traditional mystery set in a small Southern town was a modest commercial success as were the two series of novels Harris went on to launch Aurora Teagarden about a spunky crime-solving librarian and Lily Bard about a cleaning lady with a complicated past who investigates murders.Harriss breakout successthe Sookie Stackhouse novels (also known as the Southern Vampire series)came when she grew tired of writing conventional mysteries and moved into the paranormal world.Following multiple rejections from publishers she sold her first Stackhouse book Dead Until Dark which debuted in 2001.
Dead Until Dark along with the other novels in the series is narrated by the mind-reading Stackhouse and set in Bon Temps Louisiana a fictional rural town populated by humans vampires (who drink synthetic blood) shape-shifters and witches among others.The Arkansas-based Harris has published more than 10 Stackhouse novels all of which combine elements of the mystery fantasy and romance genres and have Dead in the title including Club Dead (2003) From Dead to Worse (2008) and Dead in the Family (2010).The books inspired HBOs popular True Blood TV series which premiered in 2008.In 2005 Harris debuted a new mystery series about a young woman named Harper Connelly who as a result of being struck by lightning can locate dead people and hear their final thoughts.
Harris varied cast of characters has earned her a widespread following and in May 2011 she became the fourth author ever to sell 1 million e-books for the Amazon Kindle e-reader after Steig Larsson James Patterson and Nora Roberts.
