Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks (born 1965) is an American novelist, screenwriter and film producer whose romantic novels, beginning with The Notebook in 1996, have sold more than 130 million copies and been adapted into a long run of Hollywood films.

He was born Nicholas Charles Sparks on 31 December 1965 in Omaha, Nebraska. He attended the University of Notre Dame on a track and field scholarship and graduated in business finance. Before fiction made his name he worked in pharmaceutical sales, real estate and orthopaedic manufacturing, and co-wrote a non-fiction book, Wokini, with the Olympic runner Billy Mills.

The Notebook, written over six months when he was 28, was bought by the Time Warner Book Group in October 1995 for a reported advance of 1 million dollars. It reached the New York Times list in its first week and stayed a hardback bestseller for more than a year. Later novels include Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember (1999), Nights in Rodanthe (2002), Dear John (2006), The Lucky One (2008), The Last Song (2009), Safe Haven (2010) and The Longest Ride (2013). His 25th novel, Remain, written with M. Night Shyamalan, appeared in October 2025. Eleven of his books were filmed between 1999 and 2016, and The Notebook was also turned into a Broadway musical.

For collectors. The key title is The Notebook, first published by Warner Books in the United States on 1 October 1996 (ISBN 0-446-52080-2, 214 pages). Compare the publisher, date and ISBN on the copyright page with those details before treating a copy as the original printing.