Dead to the World (Paperback)

Charlaine Harris is that rare example of a novelist who owes a large portion of her fan base to television. Harris is a remarkably prolific writer who was first published in 1981, but her popularity increased exponentially in 2008 when HBO launched its series TRUE BLOOD, based on her series of mysteries starring a telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse. Harris was born (in 1951) and raised in Tunica, Mississippi, a former cotton town which was later revitalized by casino river boats. She has lived in the south her whole life, in various states and cities, including attending Rhodes College in Memphis, where she saw several of her one-act plays produced. Following an unsuccessful first marriage, Harris was in a rut, bouncing between dead-end jobs, when she met the man who would become her second husband. As a wedding gift, he gave her an electric typewriter and told her to become a full-time writer, a magnanimous gesture which turned out to be a very fruitful decision. Harris had no problem getting her first novel published, and she has not looked back ever since, churning out an average of one book per year since 1981. She has helmed no less than three popular ongoing series--a set of classic whodunits starring a Georgia librarian named Aurora Teagarden; a series of darker mysteries taking place in Shakespeare, Arkansas, featuring a psychologically damaged cleaning lady named Lily Bard; and, of course, the enormously popular "Southern Vampire Mysteries," wherein Sookie Stackhouse negotiates a world inhabited by vampires, werewolves, changelings, and other creatures of the night. Harris lives in Arkansas with her husband and three children.