Snicket, Lemony << SNIHK uht, LEHM uh nee >> (1970-…), is the pen name of Daniel Handler, the author of a popular series of children’s stories called “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” The series follows the adventures of the three Baudelaire children: 14-year-old Violet; her 12-year-old brother, Klaus; and baby sister, Sunny. Reviewers have praised the books for their droll wit as well as their exciting adventures.
Snicket introduced the Baudelaire children in The Bad Beginning (1999). The children became orphans after their wealthy parents died in a fire. They were made wards of their cousin, the evil Count Olaf, who schemes to rob the children of their inheritance. The books in the series trace the adventures of the Baudelaires as they try to avoid the pursuing count. The 13th and final volume of the series was published in 2006. A motion-picture adaptation of three of the novels was released in 2004 as Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. All 13 books were adapted into the television series “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” which ran from 2017 to 2019.
Handler was born in San Francisco, California, on Feb. 28, 1970. He began his literary career as a poet, winning a college poetry prize in 1990 from the Academy of American Poets while he attended Wesleyan University. Handler soon turned to prose. He has written five books for adults under his own name, the novels The Basic Eight (1999), Watch Your Mouth (2000), All the Dirty Parts (2017), and Bottle Grove (2019), and a collection of related stories, Adverbs (2006). He also wrote a mock autobiography called Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (2002) and a collection of sayings and observations called Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid (2007). Handler has said he invented the name Lemony Snicket as a way to avoid being placed on unwanted mailing lists.
Snicket has written several picture books. He wrote two humorous Christmas picture books, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story (2007) and The Lump of Coal (2008), and the picture book 13 Words (2010). He collaborated with the Canadian-born illustrator Jon Klassen on the picture book The Dark (2013) and with Lisa Brown, his wife, on the picture book 29 Myths on the Swinster Pharmacy (2014).
Handler’s other works include The Composer Is Dead (2009), a murder mystery for young people that includes a compact disc of music by the American composer Nathaniel Stookey and Handler’s narration; Why We Broke Up (2011), a novel for young adults about the breakup of a teenage romance; and We Are Pirates (2015), a comic novel about a 14-year-old girl who leads an attempt to hijack a ship in San Francisco Bay. A series of “autobiographical” accounts called “All the Wrong Questions” was published in four volumes. The series consists of Who Could That Be at This Hour? (2012), When Did You See Her Last? (2013), Shouldn’t You Be in School? (2014), and Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? (2015). Poison for Breakfast (2021) is also a Lemony Snicket mystery.
