Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks (born December 31, 1965, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.) is an American novelist known for his best-selling tales of romance and heartbreak.

Sparks grew up mainly in north-central California, where his family moved when he was eight. He attended the University of Notre Dame on a track scholarship, but an injury ended his budding athletic career and induced him to write his first (unpublished) novel. He graduated (1988) with a major in business and held a variety of jobs, including pharmaceutical salesman. In the early 1990s he and his wife, Cathy Cote, settled in New Bern, North Carolina, which later provided a setting for his novels.

While working his day job, Sparks continued to write. He began a collaboration with former Olympic runner Billy Mills on Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book, which was inspired by a Native American legend, was published in 1990. Determined to become a professional writer, Sparks spent several months working on The Notebook, his first published novel, which hit The New York Times best-seller list immediately after it reached the public in 1996. By the time the film adaptation was released in 2004, Sparks had published seven more novels, two of which, Message in a Bottle (1998) and A Walk to Remember (1999), had already arrived in cinemas, in 1999 and 2002, respectively.

Sparks saw a number of other novels adapted for the screen, including Nights in Rodanthe (2002; film 2008), Dear John (2006; film 2010), The Choice (2007; film 2016), The Last Song (2009; film 2010), The Lucky One (2008; film 2012), The Best of Me (2011; film 2014), and The Longest Ride (2013; film 2015). In 2015 he released the novel See Me, about a pair of lovers with troubled pasts. Later works include Two by Two (2016), Every Breath (2018), The Return (2020), and Counting Miracles (2024).

Although Sparks’s fiction usually involves love stories, he rejects the suggestion that he is a “romance novelist.” His supporters agree that although romance plays a role in his works, Sparks explores more-serious subject matter, such as loneliness, grief, obsession, and loss, and that many of his books feature poignant, less-than-happy endings. That is also evident in his only nonfiction work, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004), in which he and his brother, Micah, share their own emotional responses to the deaths of their parents and sister.

Sparks, a devout Roman Catholic, has devoted much of his time and literary profits to writing programs at Notre Dame and to charitable causes, most notably the Nicholas Sparks Foundation, which he and his wife established in 2011. The related Epiphany School of Global Studies, a coeducational college preparatory school “rooted in the Christian faith,” opened in 2006 in New Bern. In January 2015 he announced that he and his wife had separated; they divorced later that year.