Daniel Handler

His father was a Jewish refugee from Germany in 1939.

His mother is distantly related to British writer Hugh Walpole.

Of his early religious upbringing, Handler said, "I had a fairly standard Reform Jewish upbringing, I guess, in terms of the religious side of it."

He has a younger sister, Rebecca Handler.

He attended Commodore Sloat Elementary, Herbert Hoover Middle School, and Lowell High School.

Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970) is an American author, musician, screenwriter, television writer, and television producer.

He is best known for his children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, published under the pen name Lemony Snicket.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1992.

He was awarded the 1992 Connecticut Student Poet Prize, which he has said he won by ripping off Elizabeth Bishop.

He is an alumnus of the San Francisco Boys Chorus.

Handler has been a voracious reader since childhood.

The first book he bought as a child was The Blue Aspic by Edward Gorey, of whom he is a fan.

He enjoyed the writings of William Maxwell and Roald Dahl.

He is married to Lisa Brown, an illustrator he met in college.

Handler has said the novel was rejected 37 times before being published in 1999.

Watch Your Mouth, his second novel, was completed before publication of The Basic Eight.

It follows a more operatic theme, complete with stage directions and various acts.

Watch Your Mouth's second half replaces the opera troupe with the form of a 12-step recovery program, linguistically undergone by the protagonist.

Handler wrote the bestselling series of 13 novels A Series of Unfortunate Events under the Snicket pseudonym from 1999 to 2006.

They have a child, born in 2003.

They live in an Edwardian house in San Francisco.

Handler has expressed ambivalence about his wealth and the expectations it creates.

He often donates money to charitable causes.

Handler and his wife have also donated $1,000,000 to Planned Parenthood, and he has supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Handler describes himself as a secular humanist and an atheist.

He describes himself as having developed a "feminist consciousness" while in college.

Six of Handler's major works have been published under his name.

His first, The Basic Eight, was rejected by many publishers for its subject matter and tone (a dark view of a teenage girl's life).

The former was adapted into a film in 2004 as well as a Netflix series from 2017 to 2019.

Handler has published adult novels and a stage play under his real name, along with other children's books under the Snicket pseudonym.

His first book, a satirical fiction piece titled The Basic Eight, was rejected by many publishers for its dark subject matter.

Handler has also played the accordion in several bands, and appeared on the album 69 Love Songs by indie pop band The Magnetic Fields.

Handler was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Sandra Handler (née Walpole), a retired City College of San Francisco dean, and Louis Handler, an accountant.

In April 2005, Handler published Adverbs, a collection of short stories that he says are "about love."

It was followed in 2011 by Why We Broke Up, which received a 2012 Michael L. Printz honor award.

Handler served as a judge for the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2012.

Handler's 2015 novel We Are Pirates is about a modern-age pirate who "wants to be an old-fashioned kind of pirate."

In 2016, he founded Per Diem Press, a poetry competition for young writers.

He awarded $1,000 to three winners and published a chapbook of their work.

His most recent novel, All the Dirty Parts, was published in 2017 and "takes the blunt and constant presence of a male teen's sexuality and considers it with utmost seriousness".