Danielle Steel

Danielle Steel (born August 14, 1947, in New York City) is an American writer best known for her romance novels. She is one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time, with more than 800 million copies sold, and her name has been tied to popular, mass-market fiction since the 1970s.

She was born to a German father and a Portuguese mother. Her father was a German-Jewish immigrant and a descendant of the owners of the Löwenbräu brewery; her mother was the daughter of a Portuguese diplomat. Much of her childhood was spent in France, where from an early age she attended her parents' dinner parties and watched the lives of wealthy and famous people up close, a world that would later furnish much of her fiction. Her parents divorced when she was eight, and she was raised mainly by her father. She began writing stories as a child and wrote poetry as a teenager. She studied at the Lycée Français in New York and then at Parsons School of Design and New York University.

She started writing while still at university and finished her first manuscript at 19. She worked in public relations and as a copywriter in San Francisco. An editor at Ladies' Home Journal, impressed by her freelance articles, urged her to concentrate on writing. Her first novel, Going Home, appeared in 1973, already showing the family-centred and interpersonal themes she would become known for. Her early-1970s novels launched her career, and from the early 1990s she was a near-permanent presence on The New York Times bestseller lists. In 1999 she entered the Guinness World Records for the most consecutive weeks on that list of any author.

Her working method is as notable as her output. By her own account each book takes about two and a half years, and she has learned to juggle as many as five projects at once, researching one book while outlining another. Her novels often follow wealthy families through a crisis, with darker elements such as prison, fraud or suicide. Besides fiction she has written non-fiction, poetry and a series of 57 illustrated children's books, the "Max and Martha" series, which helps young readers face everyday problems such as a new sibling or a new school.

Her legacy is largely commercial and social. Her books have been translated into 43 languages and 22 have been adapted for television. She set up a foundation that funds mental-health organisations in memory of her son Nick, who died by suicide in 1997. Critics have long questioned the literary merit of her work, though her popularity with readers is beyond dispute.