Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Charles Sparks, born December 31, 1965, in Omaha, Nebraska, is an American novelist, screenwriter, and film producer whose work belongs firmly to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century book-and-film culture. He has published 24 novels and two works of nonfiction, with more than 130 million copies sold worldwide, including 92 million in the United States, in more than 50 languages. Sixteen of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers, and his name is closely tied to stories that have moved from the page to the screen.

Sparks grew up in a family that moved often before settling in Fair Oaks, California, in 1974. His father, Patrick Michael Sparks, was a business professor, and his mother, Jill Emma Marie Sparks, was a homemaker and an optometrist’s assistant. He was the middle of three children, between his older brother, Michael Earl “Micah” Sparks, and his younger sister, Danielle “Dana” Sparks Lewis. Dana died at 33 from a brain tumor, an event that inspired A Walk to Remember.

In 1984, Sparks graduated valedictorian of Bella Vista High School. He attended the University of Notre Dame on a track and field scholarship, majored in business finance, and graduated magna cum laude. While at Notre Dame, he began writing, producing a first unpublished novel, The Passing, in 1985, and later another unpublished novel, The Royal Murders, in 1989. He married Cathy Cote in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina. Before fiction became his career, he worked in pharmaceutical sales and in other jobs, including real estate and manufacturing orthopedic products.

His first published book was Wokini, a nonfiction book co-written with Billy Mills about Lakota spiritual beliefs and practices. It sold 50,000 copies in its first year. Sparks’s breakthrough came in 1995, when literary agent Theresa Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. Published in October 1996, the novel reached The New York Times bestseller list in its first week and stayed there for fifty-six weeks.

After The Notebook, Sparks wrote Message in a Bottle, which became the first of his novels adapted as a feature film in 1999. Eleven of his books have been turned into films: Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, Safe Haven, The Best of Me, The Longest Ride, and The Choice. He produced four of those films, including Safe Haven, The Best of Me, The Longest Ride, and The Choice. Films based on his novels have grossed $889,615,166 worldwide.

Sparks lives in New Bern, North Carolina, and has three sons and twin daughters. In 2015, he divorced Cathy Cote after 25 years of marriage. His public work has also included major giving: donations to New Bern High School, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, and the University of Notre Dame Creative Writing Program, as well as The Nicholas Sparks Foundation, founded in 2012. For readers who come to him through brief lines or full novels, his words still speak because they are tied to recognizable facts of life: family, loss, love, work, and the search for meaning across ordinary days.