The Silence of the Lambs Study Guide

Thomas Harris grew up in Rich, Mississippi. After graduating high school, he attended Baylor University, where he studied English. In college, Harris was a reporter for the Waco Tribune-Herald, where he covered stories about local law enforcement. While in school, Harris met and married Harriet Haley, who he would divorce in 1968. After college, he lived in New York City for some time while writing for the Associated Press and working on his debut novel, Black Sunday. In 1975, Harris published Black Sunday, a thriller about a terrorist plot to drop a bomb at the Super Bowl. The book did reasonably well, and Harris followed it up six years later with Red Dragon, the first of his novels to feature his most famous and notorious character: Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter is a psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial killer. His mix of intelligence, charm, and menace was a massive hit with audiences. After Red Dragon, all of Harris’s fiction became Hannibal-focused. He published The Silence of the Lambs—his most famous work—in 1988, Hannibal in 1999, and Hannibal Rising in 2006. There are several well-known and respected adaptations of Harris’s work, including Jonathan Demme’s film, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), and NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015). In 2019, Harris published his first non-Hannibal novel since Black Sunday, titled Cari Mora.

Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs in the 1980s, a time when stories of serial killers saturated the media. In particular, the arrest and trial of Ted Bundy in the 1970s led to a fascination with monstrous people. Bundy is one of the United States’ most notorious killers and is responsible for kidnapping, raping, and murdering at least 30 women. Over the course of Bundy’s trial, the media did not hold back from sharing the horrific details of Bundy’s crimes with the public, which typically included acts of necrophilia. Many literary works borrowed details from the Bundy case, including The Silence of the Lambs. In Harris’s novel, Buffalo Bill lures women in by putting on a fake cast and asking them for help, a strategy that comes directly from Bundy’s playbook. After Bundy, the public’s interest in serial killers only ramped up. The 1980s were full of news stories about serial killers, including Richard Ramirez (“The Night Stalker”), Larry Eyler (“The Interstate Killer”), and Jeffrey Dahmer. Much of the public fascination with serial killers relates to their psychological profiles. The Silence of the Lambs capitalized on the public’s interest by offering them a character in Hannibal Lecter who is simultaneously a renowned psychiatrist and a serial killer.

The Silence of the Lambs is actually a quasi-sequel to Thomas Harris’ second novel, Red Dragon. Red Dragon features many of the same characters as The Silence of the Lambs, including Jack Crawford, Will Graham, and Hannibal Lecter. Harris also wrote a direct sequel to The Silence of the Lambs titled Hannibal, which focuses on Hannibal and Starling’s relationship following the events of The Silence of the Lambs. In addition, Harris also wrote a prequel story for Hannibal Lecter titled Hannibal Rising. Often, critics reference Hannibal Lecter as one of fiction’s great literary monsters. In a famous review, Stephen King compared him to the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and others have compared him to King’s own creations, such as Pennywise the Clown from It.