Danielle Steel

Danielle Steel is one of the best-selling authors alive, with hundreds of millions of copies of her novels in print worldwide since her 1973 debut, Going Home. Working almost entirely in standalone family-saga romance, she has published new novels at a pace few authors match — often several a year for five decades running — each one a self-contained story of love, loss, wealth, and resilience, frequently centered on a family weathering divorce, illness, war, or sudden reversal of fortune. Her settings range across San Francisco society, European aristocracy, and wartime Europe, and her plots favor sweeping multi-generational scope compressed into a single volume rather than a continuing series. Steel's books are frequently adapted for television, particularly through a long-running string of Lifetime and Hallmark movies, which has kept her name recognizable to readers who have never opened one of her novels. She has also written nonfiction, including His Bright Light, a memoir about the death of her son Nick Traina, and a handful of children's books. Beyond fiction, Steel is known for maintaining an intensely private personal life relative to her public fame, and for a work ethic that has become part of her public persona — she has spoken publicly about writing for up to twenty hours at a stretch. New readers can start almost anywhere in her catalog, since each title stands entirely alone.