Anne Rice - Queen of Goth
One of the most beloved residents of the Garden District, was Gothic fiction hero Anne Rice. She was born just outside of the neighborhood known as the Irish Channel. As its name implies, there were tons of Irish Catholic families there when she was a child. It wasn’t so affluent, in fact Rice, herself, called it “a Catholic ghetto.” She, though raised a Catholic, decided to separate from the faith citing her God was personal and not of any religion.
She was born on October 4, 1941 second of four children.
Her parents named her Howard Allen O’Brien. This is interesting because that was her father’s name. Depending on which source you believe she either named by her mother because she thought ‘it would be interesting.’ Or she was named by her dad cuz he was just bad at naming girls. In any case she changed it to ‘Anne’ when she entered school.
Mikko Macchione
Tour Guide with Unique NOLA Tours and Author of books about New Orleans.
Rice left New Orleans to attend college in Texas, but money got tight and she ended up staying with friends in San Francisco. She returned to Texas to marry her high school boyfriend, Sam Rice. She was twenty, he was nineteen. Right smack in the middle of the Sixties and its hippie boom, the Rice’s lived in the Castro.
They sadly lost their five year old daughter in the early Seventies, and that’s when Rice began to write. She finished “Interview With the Vampire” in 1973 and it was the beginning of her so-called “Vampire Chronicles,” which eventually included ten novels.
Rice also ventured in other writing styles besides Gothic – she tried erotica and quasi-religious.There is an annual Halloween Ball in New Orleans, that she began.
Despite living in California, she often returned to New Orleans, which she never lost affection for. She ultimately owned four houses in and near the Garden District. You can see her main house on First Street on our Garden District tour.
We lost Anne Rice on December 11, 2021 – just shy of eighty years old.
