Seth Grahame-Smith biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Sometimes credited with kicking off a new genre of literature, Seth Grahame-Smith is the writer of the best-selling mash-up novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. He grew up in Connecticut, living in Weston and later Bethel. He went to Bethel High School, where one of his English teachers remembers him as being "very creative."

After graduating in 1994, Grahame-Smith moved to Boston to study film at Emerson College. He completed his degree there in 1998, and soon made his way to Los Angeles. Working in television, Grahame-Smith served as a producer and writer for such shows as History's Mysteries. After a while, he said he came to a realization that he would rather be the one writing and trying to sell ideas, and became a freelance writer. "I was sitting on the wrong side of the desk—all these writers were pitching me," he told Los Angeles Magazine.

Career Highlights

For Quirk Books, Grahame-Smith first penned an in-depth examination of adult entertainment—The Big Book of Porn: A Penetrating Look at the World of Dirty Movies (2005). He quickly followed up that tome with The Spider-Man Handbook: The Ultimate Training Manual (2005), a humorous how-to guide about becoming one of the most popular superheroes in comic book history. Again mixing his tongue-in-cheek sense of humor with interesting factual content, Grahame-Smith wrote How to Survive a Horror Movie: All the Skills to Dodge the Kills (2007). Tackling political satire, he wrote 2008's Pardon My President: Ready-to-Mail Apologies for 8 Years of George W. Bush.

In 2009, Grahame-Smith experienced a tremendous career breakthrough. Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak had come up with an idea for a literary mash-up, combining the great Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice with zombies. Working on a tight deadline, Grahame-Smith rose to the challenge. He created an entertaining revision of the classic work that consisted of 85 percent of Austen's original novel. "When you take a look at the original book, it's almost as if, subconsciously, Jane Austen is laying out the perfect groundwork for an ultraviolent, bone-crushing zombie massacre to take place," Grahame-Smith told Entertainment Weekly.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) became a hugely popular novel, selling more than 1 million copies. It has been translated into 20 languages. Grahame-Smith, the book's co-author, alongside Austen, earned praise for his deft handling of the material. A critic for Commentary said of his work: "perfect, deploying just the right tone of ironical detachment." It also spawned a wave of similar mash-ups, including another reworking of Austen's book, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which was also published by Quirk.