A professor of literature says Dan Brown is having it both ways: getting publicity by infuriating people, but getting away with it because of his book’s fiction label.

Nancy Nahra, professor of literature and chair of the humanities department at Champlain College, says that “reality doesn’t play by the same rules that fiction has to. Dan Brown is having it both ways: getting publicity by infuriating people, but getting away with it because of its fiction label. In any case, people are taking the story too literally.”

 

Most recently, the authors of the 1982 nonfiction book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” sued publisher Random House, Inc., alleging that parts of their work formed the basis of Brown's novel, which has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and remains high on best-seller lists three years after publication.

The film version of “The Da Vinci Code,” slated for a May 19 release, is further angering the book’s detractors.

When Dan Brown’s internationally best-selling book “The Da Vinci Code” was released in March of 2003, the Catholic Church denounced the text as blasphemous. 

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