Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of several children's biographies, serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best-known work) and appearing as a character within the series. Because of this, the name "Lemony Snicket" may refer to either the fictional character or the real person. This article deals primarily with the character. As a character, Snicket is a harried, troubled writer and researcher falsely accused of felonies and is continuously hunted by the police and his enemies: the fire-starting side of the secret organization Volunteer Fire Department (V.F.D.). As a child, he was kidnapped and inducted as a "neophyte" into V.F.D., where he was trained in rhetoric and sent on seemingly pointless missions while all connections to his former life, apart from his siblings Jacques and Kit (who were also kidnapped and inducted), were severed. In the organization, he met and fell in love with a peer named Beatrice, to whom he eventually became engaged. After a series of unfortunate events (after which the real-world series is in some ways named), he was falsely accused of murder and arson. Eventually the fallacies grew so much that The Daily Punctilio reported his death. Beatrice eventually moved on and married Bertrand Baudelaire, becoming the mother of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, the protagonists of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Fourteen years thereafter Beatrice and Bertrand were murdered in a house fire, leaving the Baudelaires orphans. Feeling indebted to his former fiancée, Snicket embarks on a quest to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire children until they become old enough to face the troubles of the world on their own. Snicket is the subject of a fictional autobiography, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (which contains an introduction from a fictionalized version of Daniel Handler). A pamphlet, 13 Shocking Secrets You'll Wish You Never Knew About Lemony Snicket, was released in promotion of The End. Other works by Snicket include The Baby in the Manger, The Composer Is Dead, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, The Lump of Coal, and 13 Words. Snicket is currently writing All the Wrong Questions, a new children's series whose first book Who Could That Be at This Hour was released in October 2012.