Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts (Eleanor Marie Robertson) was born on October 10, 1950, in Silver Spring, MD, the youngest of five children. Roberts married her first husband, Ronald Aufdem Brinke, in 1968, shortly after graduating from high school, and a few years later, had two sons. She spent her spare time crafting for many years, until a fateful blizzard came along in February 1979. Snowed in with her young boys (who were 3 and 6 years old at the time), Roberts turned to her storytelling skills and began writing down, with pencil and paper, a story.. and her career was set in motion. Roberts produced several manuscripts over the next year or two, received rejection letters from publishers, and then, in 1981, sold her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, to Silhouette, a romance publisher.

Over the next two years, Roberts published 23 more novels, finally catching the public's attention in 1985 with Playing the Odds. That novel was a breakthrough for Roberts, and she became a fan favorite. Since then Roberts has published more than 140 novels, chiefly romance, and selling more than 127 million copies of her books in the United States alone.