Lemony Snicket is the pen name of the American writer Daniel Handler and the narrator of his thirteen-book children’s series “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, published between 1999 and 2006. Books under the Snicket name have sold more than 65 million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages.
Handler was born in San Francisco on 28 February 1970 and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1992. The Snicket name began as an alias he used while researching his first novel, “The Basic Eight”, when he wanted to request material from organisations without giving his real name. That novel, a dark view of a teenage girl’s life, was by his own account rejected 37 times before it was published in 1999.
“The Bad Beginning” came out the same year. It introduces the Baudelaire orphans, three children whose parents die in a fire that destroys their home and who are placed in the custody of their distant cousin Count Olaf. Snicket serves as their narrator and biographer through all thirteen books, addressing the reader directly, and the sequence closes with “The End” in 2006. Companion volumes include “Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography” and “The Beatrice Letters”.
The books were filmed in 2004 as “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”, with Jude Law voicing Snicket, and adapted by Netflix as a television series that ran from 2017 to 2019 with Patrick Warburton in the role. Handler wrote for the Netflix version, which won a Peabody Award in 2017.
From 2012 to 2015 Handler returned to the character with “All the Wrong Questions”, four books about Snicket’s childhood apprenticeship in the failing town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. He has also published picture books as Snicket, among them “The Dark”, illustrated by Jon Klassen, and several illustrated by his wife, Lisa Brown, including “The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming” and “Goldfish Ghost”. “Poison for Breakfast”, in which Snicket finds a note under his door telling him he has had poison for breakfast, appeared in 2021.
Under his own name Handler has published novels including “Watch Your Mouth”, “Adverbs” and “We Are Pirates”. “Why We Broke Up” (2011) received a Michael L. Printz Honor in 2012, and his most recent book, “And Then? And Then? What Else?”, was published in 2024.
Publication Order of A Series of Unfortunate Events Books
The Bad Beginning
1999
The Reptile Room
1999
The Wide Window
2000
The Miserable Mill
2000
The Austere Academy
2000
The Ersatz Elevator
2001
The Vile Village
2001
The Hostile Hospital
2001
The Carnivorous Carnival
2002
The Slippery Slope
2003
The Grim Grotto
2004
The Penultimate Peril
2005
The End
2006
Publication Order of A Series of Unfortunate Events Companion Books
Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography
2002
The Beatrice Letters
2006
Publication Order of All the Wrong Questions Books
Who Could That Be at This Hour?
2012
When Did You See Her Last?
2013
Shouldn’t You Be in School?
2014
Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?
