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BORN IN OMAHA, 1965 · NOTRE DAME, CLASS OF 1988
The tie, exactly. Nicholas Sparks was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1965 and raised in Fair Oaks, California. South Bend's claim is the formation and nothing more, printed at the strength Famous People prints it: he came to the University of Notre Dame on a track scholarship, ran the 4×800 relay on a school-record team, and took his degree in business finance, with honors, in 1988. The books were written afterward, in North Carolina, and this entry exists because the formation is documented to the summer between his freshman and sophomore years.
The books. In that summer of 1985, injured and confined, he wrote his first novel, The Passing, at his mother's direction; it was never published, and a second apprentice novel, The Royal Murders (1989), went unpublished too. His first published book was not a novel: Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding (Orion Books, 1990), a nonfiction collaboration with the Olympic champion Billy Mills. The breakthrough was The Notebook (Warner Books, October 1996) — a million-dollar advance from the Time Warner Book Group, a New York Times bestseller in its first week of release, and the foundation of a shelf of more than twenty novels since, among them Message in a Bottle (1998) and A Walk to Remember (1999), many of them filmed. The personal record — the fame, the marriage, the philanthropy — stands in Famous People; the writing's start, under this roof, stands here.
Sources:
- The author's official biography — the Notre Dame scholarship, the school-record 4×800 relay, the 1988 business finance degree with honors, the unpublished The Passing (written the summer of 1985), Wokini (Orion Books, 1990), and The Notebook's October 1996 publication, million-dollar advance and first-week bestseller standing (Warner Books).
- Famous People (this record) — the tie at its printed strength: the Notre Dame alumnus, born in Omaha, raised in California.