On October 10, 1950, Nora Roberts was born. Roberts is one of the most popular authors of romance novels, with more than 200 novels to her credit.
Roberts was not interested in writing as a child. She says that she always made up stories, though, and told “really good [lies]—some of which my mother still believes.” She started putting those stories down on paper in 1979, when she was stuck at home during a blizzard. With nothing else to occupy her time, she started writing and found that she enjoyed it. Fairly quickly, she had six manuscripts ready to send to publishers.
She sent them to Harlequin, which was at the time the major publisher of romance novels. She says that she received polite rejection notices, but Harlequin published mostly British writers at the time; as Roberts put it, “they already had their American writer” in Janet Dailey.
With romance novels so popular in the United States, and Harlequin generally uninterested in the work of American writers, it was inevitable that a competitor would arise. In 1980, Silhouette Books was formed, and Roberts found her first publishing home there. She chose “Nora Roberts” as her pseudonym—a shorter form of her birth name, Eleanor Marie Robertson—because she thought that all romance writers used pseudonyms.
Roberts’ first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, was published in 1981, and by 1984, Silhouette had published 23 of her books. By 1987, Roberts had moved to larger publishers, and began publishing standalone novels in hardcover. She continued, as she still does, to publish many of her series novels in paperback because they can be published in that format with shorter gaps between volumes, allowing a trilogy of related novels to be read more quickly.
Roberts is an extremely prolific writer, publishing as many as a dozen novels a year. The key to such volume is dedication. Roberts spends eight hours a day writing, even when she’s on vacation. “You’re going to be unemployed if you really think you just have to sit around and wait for the muse to land on your shoulder,” she says. She focuses on one book at a time and usually writes her trilogies in a group so that she can stay focused on one set of characters until their complete story is finished. Roberts does most of her research online because she doesn’t like to fly.
By 1992, Putnam was her primary publisher, and they were unable to keep up with her output. They suggested that she adopt a second pseudonym to avoid oversaturation of the market with “Nora Roberts” books. She adopted the name “J. D. Robb.” Under that name, she writes the In Death series, near-future murder mysteries with a hint of science fiction, focusing on police officer Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke. While the books can be enjoyed as mystery novels, there is just as much focus on the development of the relationship between Eve and Roarke. The series began in 1995 with Naked in Death, and the 50th volume, Golden in Death, was published earlier this year.
In 1997, a reader spotted several instances of what appeared to be plagiarism of Roberts’ work in novels by Janet Dailey (who we mentioned earlier as Harlequin’s “American author”). Roberts sued, and Dailey acknowledged the plagiarism, blaming it on a psychological disorder. The legal case was settled in 1998, and Roberts donated the settlement money to a variety of literary organizations.
That sort of generosity is not unusual for Roberts, who has a long history of philanthropic efforts. Much of that work is done through her own foundation, which supports literacy and the arts, especially for children. The foundation also funds the Nora Roberts Center for American Romance, which supports academic research and scholarship on the American romance novel, a genre which has not often been given serious academic study.
Since 1999, every novel Roberts has published has made the New York Times bestseller list, more than 100 books so far. She was the first writer inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame, and she received their Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. In 2008, that award was renamed the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award.
Many more of Roberts’ novels are available as e-books at Overdrive.
Also This Week
October 10, 1470
Selim I was born. Selim was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for only eight years, from 1512 to 1520, but in that time, he conquered most of the Middle East, expanding his empire by roughly seventy percent. By taking control of the routes used by Muslims traveling to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he made the Ottoman Empire the most powerful force in the Islamic world. Alan Mikhail presents the history of Selim’s rule, and its importance to 16th-century Europe, in God’s Shadow.
October 8, 1870
Louis Vierne was born. Vierne was an organist and composer of organ music. He had a difficult life—he was born almost totally blind; his son and brother were both killed in World War I; and he had to spend a year re-learning to play the organ pedals after fracturing a leg in a traffic accident. He served as the principal organist at the Notre-Dame cathedral for almost 40 years, where he literally died on the job, suffering a heart attack at the end of an organ recital. Perhaps Vierne’s most important works are his six organ symphonies.
October 9, 1890
Aimee Semple McPherson was born. McPherson was a prominent evangelist of the 1920s and 1930s, a pioneer in the blending of religion and media, broadcasting her weekly sermons on the radio. Her base was the Angelus Temple in Echo Park, where her Sunday night sermons drew so many worshippers that extra police were required to manage the traffic. The media frenzy surrounding McPherson only grew when she disappeared for five weeks in 1926; many believed that her claim to have been kidnapped was a publicity stunt. Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of the biography Sister Aimee.
October 5, 1950
Edward P. Jones was born. Jones is a novelist and short story writer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 2003 novel, The Known World, a story about black and white slaveholders in Virginia. His two collections of short stories, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, are linked in an unusual way. Each collection contains fourteen stories, with each story in Children being a sort of sequel to the corresponding story in Lost.