Birthday quote

Danielle Steel
Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel, better known by the name Danielle Steel, is an American novelist, currently the best selling author alive and the fourth bestselling fiction author of all time, with over 800 million copies sold.

Based in California for most of her career, Steel has produced several books a year, often juggling up to five projects at once. Despite "a resounding lack of critical acclaim" all her novels have been bestsellers. Her formula is fairly consistent, often involving rich families facing a crisis, threatened by dark elements such as prison, fraud, blackmail and suicide. Steel has also published children's fiction and poetry, as well as raising funds for the treatment of mental disorders. Her books have been translated into 43 languages, with 22 adapted for television.

Steel was born in New York City and raised Catholic. She spent much of her childhood in France, where she was included in her parents' dinner parties, giving her an opportunity to observe the habits and lives of the wealthy and famous. Steel started writing stories as a child, and by her late teens had begun writing poetry. A graduate of the Lycée Français de New York, she studied literature design and fashion design, first at Parsons School of Design in 1963 and then at New York University from 1963 to 1967.

In 1965, when she was 18, Steel married French-American banker Claude-Eric Lazard. Her first manuscript was completed the following year. After nine years of marriage, Steel and Lazard divorced. In 1972 her first novel, Going Home, was published, containg many of the themes that her writing would become known for, including a focus on family issues. While still married to Lazard, Steel met Danny Zugelder while interviewing an inmate in a prison where Zugelder was also incarcerated. After receiving her divorce from Lazard in 1975, she married Zugelder in the prison canteen. She divorced him in 1978, but the relationship spawned Passion's Promise and Now and Forever, the two novels that launched her career.

Steel married her third husband, William George Toth, the day after her divorce from Zugelder was finalized. She was already pregnant with his child, Nicholas. They divorced in March 1981. Steel married for the fourth time in 1981, to John Traina. Traina adopted Steel's son Nick and together they had an additional five children.

Coincidentally, beginning with her marriage to Traina in 1981, Steel has been a near-permanent fixture on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestsellers lists. In 1989, she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times Bestseller List for the most consecutive weeks of any author--381 consecutive weeks at that time. Since her first book was published, every one of her novels has hit bestseller lists in paperback, and each one released in hardback has also been a hardback bestseller.

Born 14th August 1947 in New York City, U.S.

I believe in love at first sight for houses – but not for people.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.