Biography of Nicholas Sparks

As a child, he lived in Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Grand Island, NE, finally settling in Fair Oaks, CA at the age of eight. His father was a professor, his mother an optometrist's assistant. He lived in Fair Oaks through high school, graduated valedictorian in 1984, and received a full track scholarship to the University of Notre Dame.

After breaking the Notre Dame school record as part of a relay team in 1985 as a freshman (a record which still stands), he was injured and spent the summer recovering. During that summer, he wrote his first novel, though it was never published. He majored in Business Finance and graduated with high honors in 1988.

He and his wife Catherine, whom he met on spring break in 1988, were married in July 1989. While living in Sacramento, he wrote his second novel later that year, though again it wasn't published. He worked at a variety of jobs over the next three years, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and started his own small manufacturing business which struggled from the beginning. In 1990, he collaborated on a book with Billy Mills, the Olympic gold medallist, and it was published by Feather Publishing before later being picked up by Random House. Though it received scant publicity, sales topped 50,000 copies in the first year of release.

He began selling pharmaceuticals and moved from Sacramento, CA to North Carolina in 1992. In 1994, at the age of 28, he wrote The Notebook over a period of six months. In October 1995, rights to The Notebook were sold to Warner Books. It was published in October 1996, and he followed that with Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember (1999), The Rescue (2000), A Bend in the Road (2001), Nights in Rodanthe (2002) and The Guardian (2003), all published by Warner Books. All were domestic and international best sellers and have been translated into more than 35 languages. The movie version of Message in a Bottle was released in 1999 and A Walk to Remember was released in January 2002.

The film version for The Notebook will be released in 2004 and film rights to A Bend in the Road and Nights in Rodanthe have been sold as well. The Rescue is being adapted into a television series, with Nicholas Sparks serving as one of the executive producers.

Nicholas continues to live in North Carolina with his wife and five children. He is an avid athlete who runs daily, lifts weights regularly, and competes in Tae Kwon Do. He attends church regularly and reads about 125 books a year. He contributes to a variety of local and national charities and is a major contributor to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame, where he provides scholarships, internships and an annual fellowship.