At the age of 28, Nicholas decided to make another concerted, even more serious, effort at writing. To that end, he spent the second half of writing a novel he called The Notebook , scheduling his writing time around his family's schedule.
A year later, while living in Greenville, South Carolina, where he was transferred for his pharmaceutical sales job, Nicholas was offered a contract by a young, new agent with no published novels to her credit. The next year also brought a mix of success and tragedy: Nicholas' father died in an automobile accident at the age of 54, just a month before Nicholas embarked on a city tour to promote The Notebook.
That novel eventually spent 55 weeks on both The New York Times hardcover and The New York Times paperback bestseller lists and was translated into 45 languages. Over the next several years, Nicholas continued to write, saw several of his novels adapted into film, and welcomed three more children to his family. Today, Nicholas lives in North Carolina, where he continues his prolific writing career and lives with his wife Cathy and their five children: Miles, Ryan, Landon, and twins Lexie and Savannah.
Each of Nicholas' novels has ranked as an international bestseller. After The Notebook , additional novels followed in rapid succession, including Message in a Bottle , published in , and A Walk to Remember , published in In , Message in a Bottle became the first of Nicholas' novels to be released as a movie. Previous Character Map. As a young kid he moved a lot as his father was continuing with his education. For further studies he went to University of Notre Dame where he got a full track and field scholarship and graduated in He met the girl, who was later to become his wife, during the spring break of that year.
They got married in and moved to Sacramento, California. Sparks wrote his first novel in which never got published and another one in , also not published. It sold about fifty thousand copies in the first year of being published. More importantly, Sparks continued to write. In , he got his first break when he teamed up with Billy Mills, a friend and Olympic medalist on a book called Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding , a story built around a Lakota allegory.
The book sold moderately well, and was later picked up by Random House. But Sparks, now the father of a young son, still needed to pay the bills, and in , he sold his business and ventured into the field of pharmaceutical sales.
Sparks was earning a decent living, but the frustrated writer wanted more. He decided to give himself one final chance to make it as a writer.
The plan: To write three more novels. If nothing got published, he'd move on to something else. For the next six months, beginning in June , Sparks began a manuscript that would become The Notebook.
When he finished in early , Sparks, now living in Greenville, South Carolina, found an agent, who found him a publisher.
Once again, though, Sparks's triumph gave way to devastation when his father was killed at the age of 54 in an automobile accident. The grieving author turned to writing as a source of comfort, penning a story about a man who writes letters to his deceased wife and sends them out to sea in bottles. The book, later titled Message in a Bottle , was inspired by his parents' relationship. Skeptical that he'd really made it as a writer, Sparks continued to sell pharmaceuticals while he wrote the book.
He finally retired from sales in February , when he managed to sell Message in a Bottle to a Hollywood studio before the book was even completed. The story was transformed into a film in , and featured Kevin Costner and Paul Newman.
The subsequent years brought more novels, as well as more Hollywood-blockbuster adaptations of Sparks's work. A Walk to Remember was the author's second novel to be made into a movie, which starred Mandy Moore and Shane West. Other works include The Rescue , A Bend in the Road , Nights in Rodanthe , The Wedding and the poignant Three Weeks With My Brother , which recounts a journey he and his brother Micah embarked on after becoming the only surviving members of their family. Their younger sister, Danielle, died of cancer in at the age of
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