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Nicholas Sparks

Author profile

born

December 31, 1965 in Omaha, Nebraska, The United States

gender

male

website

http://www.nicholassparks.com/

twitter username

SparksNicholas

genre

Literature & Fiction, Romance

About this author

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As a child, he lived in Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Grand Island, Nebraska, finally settling in Fair Oaks, California at the age of eight. His father was a professor, his mother a homemaker, then 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, who met on sprin...moreAs a child, he lived in Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Grand Island, Nebraska, finally settling in Fair Oaks, California at the age of eight. His father was a professor, his mother a homemaker, then 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, who met on spring break in 1988, were married in July, 1989. While living in Sacramento, he wrote his second novel that same year, though again, it wasn't published. He worked 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 Medalist and it was published by Feather Publishing before later being picked up by Random House. (It was recently re-issued by Hay House Books.) Though it received scant publicity, sales topped 50,000 copies in the first year of release.

He began selling pharmaceuticals and moved from Sacramento, California 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), and Nights in Rodanthe (2002), The Guardian (2003), The Wedding (2003), Three Weeks with my Brother (2004), True Believer (2005) and At First Sight (2005) all with Warner Books. All were domestic and international best sellers and were translated into more than 35 languages. The movie version of Message in a Bottle was released in 1999, A Walk to Remember was released in 2002, and The Notebook was released in 2004. The average domestic box office gross per film was $56 million -- with another $100 million in DVD sales -- making the novels by Nicholas Sparks one of the most successful franchises in Hollywood.

The film rights to Nights in Rodanthe, True Believer and At First Sight have been sold, and Nicholas Sparks has written the screenplay for The Guardian, though he has not offered it for sale at this point.

He now has five children: Miles, Ryan, Landon, Lexie, and Savannah. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and children.

His ancestry is German, Czech, English, and Irish, he's 5'10" and weighs 180 lbs. He is an avid athlete who runs daily, lifts weights regularly, and competes in Tae Kwon Do. He attends church regularly and reads approximately 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 a fellowship annually.(less)

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Books by Nicholas Sparks

Average rating: 3.87 · 874,979 ratings · 49,345 reviews · 68 distinct works

	The Notebook 3.84 avg rating — 326,736 ratings — published 1996 — 81 editions	My rating:
	A Walk to Remember 3.95 avg rating — 82,249 ratings — published 1999 — 66 editions	My rating:
	Dear John 3.83 avg rating — 70,144 ratings — published 2006 — 61 editions	My rating:
	The Last Song 4.11 avg rating — 56,722 ratings — published 2009 — 42 editions	My rating:
	The Wedding 3.90 avg rating — 40,090 ratings — 37 editions	My rating:
	Message in a Bottle 3.75 avg rating — 39,587 ratings — published 1998 — 65 editions	My rating:
	The Guardian 3.98 avg rating — 31,182 ratings — 40 editions	My rating:
	A Bend in the Road 3.87 avg rating — 31,854 ratings — published 2001 — 52 editions	My rating:
	Nights In Rodanthe 3.64 avg rating — 34,291 ratings — published 2002 — 58 editions	My rating:
	The Rescue 3.92 avg rating — 29,963 ratings — 51 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Nicholas Sparks

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

tags: love

9,455 people liked it

“Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it”
― Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember

tags: love

6,621 people liked it

“I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

tags: dear-john , nicholas-sparks

6,584 people liked it

See all Nicholas Sparks's quotes »

Polls

Which book would you like to see as the selection for our Spring 2011 Group Reads category Best Love Stories?

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

29 votes, 21.8%

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

26 votes, 19.5%

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

18 votes, 13.5%

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

17 votes, 12.8%

A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

15 votes, 11.3%

A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks

11 votes, 8.3%

The Luxe by Anna Godbersen

6 votes, 4.5%

The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase

5 votes, 3.8%

The Sunflower by Richard Paul Evans

3 votes, 2.3%

All This, and Heaven Too by Rachel Field

3 votes, 2.3%

133 total votes

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