After
breaking the Notre Dame school record as part of a relay team in 1985
as a freshman (a record which still stands), he was injured and spent
the summer recovering. During that summer, he wrote his first novel,
though it was never published. He majored in Business Finance and
graduated with high honors in 1988.

He and his wife Catherine,
who met on spring break in 1988, were married in July, 1989. While
living in Sacramento, he wrote his second novel that same year, though
again, it wasn’t published. He worked a variety of jobs over the next
three years, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling
dental products by phone, and started his own small manufacturing
business which struggled from the beginning. In 1990, he collaborated on
a book with Billy Mills, the Olympic Gold Medalist and it was published
by Feather Publishing before later being picked up by Random House. (It
was recently re-issued by Hay House Books.) Though it received scant
publicity, sales topped 50,000 copies in the first year of release.

He
began selling pharmaceuticals and moved from Sacramento, California to
North Carolina in 1992. In 1994, at the age of 28, he wrote The Notebook
over a period of six months. In October, 1995, rights to The Notebook
were sold to Warner Books. It was published in October, 1996, and he
followed that with Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember
(1999), The Rescue (2000), A Bend in the Road (2001), and Nights in
Rodanthe (2002), The Guardian (2003), The Wedding (2003), Three Weeks
with my Brother (2004), True Believer (2005) and At First Sight (2005)
all with Warner Books. All were domestic and international best sellers
and were translated into more than 35 languages. The movie version of
Message in a Bottle was released in 1999, A Walk to Remember was
released in 2002, and The Notebook was released in 2004. The average
domestic box office gross per film was $56 million — with another $100
million in DVD sales — making the novels by Nicholas Sparks one of the
most successful franchises in Hollywood.

The film rights to
Nights in Rodanthe, True Believer and At First Sight have been sold, and
Nicholas Sparks has written the screenplay for The Guardian, though he
has not offered it for sale at this point.

He now has five children: Miles, Ryan, Landon, Lexie, and Savannah. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and children.

His
ancestry is German, Czech, English, and Irish, he’s 5’10” and weighs
180 lbs. He is an avid athlete who runs daily, lifts weights regularly,
and competes in Tae Kwon Do. He attends church regularly and reads
approximately 125 books a year. He contributes to a variety of local and
national charities, and is a major contributor to the Creative Writing
Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame, where he provides
scholarships, internships, and a fellowship annually.