If you’re a frequent visitor to most public libraries in North America (which you should be), you’ve probably noticed a handful of authors who always seem to permeate the selection of new arrivals. James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and even Freida McFadden have come to occupy such shelf space as authors who publish multiple novels in a calendar year. But any such list of writers would be incomplete without including the highest-selling living author: Danielle Steel. Per her own website, Steel has sold over one billion copies of her books worldwide, and she’s been doing it longer than almost anyone.
Where other authors who have come to publish multiple books in a single year often became authors as a second career, Steel started as a writer from the beginning. While still a student at New York University (NYU), she completed her first novel at 19. But she’d started writing much earlier than that. Steel had something of an opulent childhood. She was born in New York City in 1947 to a Portuguese American mother and German father, and the family spent many years living in France, attending lavish dinner parties.
“I had a very adult childhood,” she said in a 1988 interview. “So I became a sort of fly-on-the-wall observer at an early age. Looking back on it now, it’s probably what made me a writer.”
But her parents divorced when she was eight, and she quickly became disillusioned with a life of luxury. “I was very bored and disenchanted with the comfortable world I grew up in,” Steel told People magazine in 2024. “I saw the hypocrisy.” The stories she wrote as a child progressed to poetry as a teenager. Steel graduated from the Lycée Français de New York (LFNY), a private bilingual French high school in Manhattan, in 1965, and went on to study fashion and literature at both Parsons School of Design and later NYU. The same year she graduated from high school, Steel married a French banker, Claude-Éric Lazard. She was 18 and then gave birth to her first child, daughter Beatrix. She would go on to have seven additional children, plus two stepchildren, and four additional marriages, all of which created both barriers and inspiration for her eventual writing career.
Against her first husband’s wishes, Steel began working for a public relations agency in New York, where she later encountered an editor from Ladies’ Home Journal. The editor was impressed with Steel’s freelance writing and encouraged her to pursue it as a profession. After separating from Lazard in 1972, she moved to San Francisco to work as a copywriter for Grey Advertising. According to a 1992 profile in People magazine, Steel “cloistered” herself for three months to finish what would become her very first novel, Going Home, in 1973. She adequately and ominously described the theme of the book to a reporter at the time as “every woman falls in love with a bastard at least once in her life.”
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During this time, Steel also became romantically involved with an incarcerated man named Danny Zugelder. She met him at a prison near Lompoc, California, while researching a magazine article on conscientious objectors in jail. Zugelder briefly lived with Steel when he was paroled, but he returned to prison in 1974 on rape and robbery charges. The following year, once her first divorce was final, Steel married Zugelder while he was imprisoned; she experienced several miscarriages before divorcing him in 1978. It was her relationship with her second husband that would influence Steel’s subsequent novels, Passion’s Promise and Now and Forever.
As for Zugelder’s thoughts on both of those books inspired by him? “I can’t stand her writing,” he once told People magazine. “They’re such mushy, trashy books.” Well, every single one of her mushy, trashy books have made bestseller lists in both hardcover and paperback, and they continue to do so over five decades later.
According to the 1992 profile in People, it was the publication of Steel’s fourth novel, The Promise, when “the money started rolling in,” and the author became a prominent member of high society in San Francisco. By that point, Steel had married a third time to William “Bill” Toth, with whom she would share her son Nick (who died tragically by suicide in 1997). In what seems to be a recurrent theme in both Steel’s novels and her own personal life, the men she surrounded herself with didn’t seem capable of handling her growing success as something other than a wife and mother.
“Danielle’s a control freak,” Toth told the magazine. “She needs people who’ll let her call the shots.” Which doesn’t seem so outrageous now, but was perhaps too much to ask of some men in the late 1970s.
Steel articulated it as, “Guys don’t like it when the focus is on you and you’re the famous person.” Steel and Toth divorced in 1981. As for her marriages to two troubled men–Toth struggled with substance abuse–Steel once remarked, “I’m probably the most uptight, conservative person you’ll meet. I’m very religious. I’ve been this way my whole life, which is why I married those two morons instead of just sleeping with them.”
By the 1980s, Steel’s career as an author was flourishing. She had already begun publishing multiple titles a year, while raising children and juggling a tumultuous love life. Having already become an established fixture on The New York Times bestseller lists, she expanded her reach by co-authoring her first book of nonfiction, Having a Baby, and her book of poetry, Love: Poems. Steel would go on to publish four additional nonfiction books, the most recent being 2020’s Expect a Miracle. “I’m astonished by my success,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Age. “I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I’d become famous. I did it at night because I loved it. I never did it to make money, as a job. I just did it because I had to.” Steel would have five children with her third husband, John Traina, making writing at night a necessity for a mother with so many responsibilities, often surviving on only four hours of sleep.
So, how does Steel manage to publish multiple novels a year when, as she told Reader’s Club in 2004, each of her books takes roughly two and a half years to complete? For one thing, the author is known as an expert-level multitasker, having once said she’s often managing up to five projects at once. Steel has also published multiple children’s and picture books.
How does she get it all done? In the 2020s, the use of ghostwriters has often generated controversy, specifically when female authors choose to be honest about it. Millie Bobby Brown, for example, faced controversy in 2023 for using a ghostwriter to flesh out her historical fiction novel Nineteen Steps, and it’s hate rarely aimed at men in similar positions. (Conversely, reality television star and actress Lisa Rinna, whose recently published memoir You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It was picked for Reese’s Book Club, was praised for her transparency about using a ghostwriter for her writing projects because she’s “not a writer”).
Questions about whether Steel has used a ghostwriter to facilitate the rapid productivity she’s known for in publishing have often been met with similar disapproval, mostly from the author herself, who has not taken kindly to the question in the past. In a 2012 post on her blog responding to rumors that she employs ghostwriters, Steel wrote: “Are you kidding? Who do you think writes my books, as I hover over my typewriter for weeks at a time, working on a first draft, with unbrushed hair, in an ancient nightgown, with every inch of my body aching after typing 20 or 22 hours a day at a stretch? That’s who writes my books: Me.”
Into her fifth decade as an author and as the highest-selling living author, Steel’s productivity has not decreased. The topic of ghostwriters doesn’t seem to have resurfaced since the early 2010s, and even if her stance on ghostwriting has changed since then, it hasn’t affected her success. At this point, it wouldn’t tarnish her legacy, either. “Her success continues unabated despite a resounding lack of critical acclaim,” wrote Publishers Weekly in a review of an unauthorized 1994 biography on Steel, one that almost made her quit writing.
Good thing she didn’t, because over 30 years later, her commercial success continues undefeated. Steel has already published two novels this year (Felicia’s Favorites and The Devil’s Daughter), with the third to follow in April 2026 (A Woman’s Place). There are four more to follow in the remainder of 2026 and two titles already planned for 2027. Literary purists like to cry that Steel doesn’t write “real” literature, and that all of her books have the same regurgitated plots and aren’t worthy of the money and attention they continue to receive. Her undying fanbase begs to differ, with Steel’s novels currently having an average 4.01 rating out of 5 on Goodreads. For an author who has been publishing consistently since 1973, that’s pretty damn good.
Let people enjoy things, and let Danielle Steel keep laughing all the way to the bank.
English (US) · 