Danielle Steel

Danielle Steel (born 1947) is an internationally best-selling author of over fifty romance novels. Since publishing her first book in 1973, Steel has acquired an enormous following of loyal, avid readers.

Steel was born on August 14, 1947, in New York City, the only child of John Schuelein-Steel, a member of Munich's wealthy Lowenbrau beer family, and Norma Schuelein-Steel, an international beauty from Portugal. Steel's parents divorced when she was seven or eight years old. Afterwards, she was raised by relatives and servants in Paris and New York. She graduated from the Lycee Francais when she was not quite fifteen and in 1963 entered New York's Parsons School of Design. However, she soon abandoned her dream of becoming "the new Chanel" when the pressure to succeed caused her to develop a stomach ulcer. She then enrolled at New York University, where she studied until 1967. When she was eighteen, Steel married her first husband, a French banker with homes in New York, San Francisco, and Paris. Within a few years, she became bored with her jet-setting lifestyle and, against her husband's wishes, decided to find a job. In 1968, she was hired as vice president of public relations and new business for Supergirls, a Manhattan public relations and advertising agency. A few years later the five-woman firm began to falter and Steel was looking to the future.

One of her clients, then the editor of Ladies' Home Journal, suggested she try writing, so Steel isolated herself at her home in San Francisco and wrote her first book, Going Home. Published by Dell paperbacks in 1973, the novel had moderate sales. Around the same time, Steel's marriage broke up, and she turned to writing in earnest. However, she composed five more novels that were rejected before Passion's Promise was published by Dell in 1977. During these years she also wrote advertising copy as well as poems about love and motherhood that appeared in women's magazines. Some of these poems were included in the abridged edition of her only volume of poetry, Love Poems: Danielle Steel (1981), which came out in 1984. After Passion's Promise, Dell published three more of Steel's romances: The Promise (1978), a novelization of a screenplay by Garry Michael White, Now and Forever (1978), which was adapted for a film released by Inter Planetary Pictures in 1983, and Season of Passion (1979). Sales of The Promise, Steel's first big success, reached two million copies in 1979, and in the same year she signed a six-figure contract with Dell.

Steel set a grueling pace for herself, composing two to three novels a year, and in the early 1980s several more best-selling paperbacks appeared. In addition, Dell's affiliate, Delacorte, began publishing Steel's books in hardcover. Thurston House (1983) was the last of her novels to originate as a paperback. Steel tailors her work habits to meet family considerations. In 1981 she married John Traina, a shipping executive who, like herself, had two children. The couple has since produced five children together. Steel works in concentrated marathon sessions, which affords her blocks of time she can devote to her large family. Unlike many of her heroines, Steel shies away from the limelight, refusing to do promotional tours, and lives a relatively quiet life that is frequently far from glamorous. When writing, she has been known to work eighteen-hour days, typing away on a 1948 metal-body Olympia in a flannel nightgown.

Though she is an extremely wealthy woman--several years ago she signed a sixty-million-dollar contract with Delacorte--Steel shows no signs of relaxing her frantic pace. By the end of 2001, she had completed 53 romance novels and was keeping up her output of two or three novels a year. That year (2001) Steel published Leap of Faith about a young woman's attempt to regain her family's chateau after she is sent to live in America following the death of her parents; Lone Eagle about the love affair of a debutante and a pilot in 1940; and The Kiss about an affair that is about to begin with a kiss in the backseat of a limousine but is interrupted by a bus smashing into the car. Since 1989, she has produced two series of books for children, the "Max and Martha" series and the "Freddie" series.

Steel's romances feature both contemporary and historical settings, and their exotic and exciting locales offer readers fast-paced escape from the routine of daily life. They typically focus on a glamorous, well-to-do heroine who proves that women can "have it all": love, family, and career. However, Steel's characters are beset by obstacles on their road to fulfillment; often they are confronted with the task of rebuilding their life after an emotionally crippling tragedy. Sometimes Steel's heroines have one or more unlucky romances before they find lasting love, but all their relationships with men lead them to increased self-awareness, which, in many cases, helps them to establish successful careers.

A sampling of Steel's plots illustrates these themes. The heroine of Passion's Promise is a beautiful young journalist, Kezia St. Martin, who temporarily puts her career on hold to be with her lover, who is a social activist. The romance ends in tragedy but it provides St. Martin with the grounding she needs to come to terms with her family's affluence and to realize her goal of becoming a renowned writer. Family Album (1985) is about a famous actress who forsakes stardom to marry a wealthy playboy, watches anxiously as her husband squanders their fortune, and then achieves success as an Oscar-winning director. Zoya (1988) traces the eventful and dramatic life of the beautiful and resourceful Russian countess Zoya Ossupov. When the violent October Revolution explodes, she loses her position, wealth, and much of her family, and she flees to Paris, where she falls in love with a wealthy American army officer, whom she marries. Zoya and her husband live an exciting life in New York City during the Roaring Twenties but her happiness is destroyed once again when the stock market crashes, bankrupts her husband, and causes him to suffer a fatal heart attack. Another marriage brings more heartache. Zoya's second husband, a Seventh Avenue mogul who helps her launch a chain of department stores, enlists in the armed forces after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and is killed in action. Brokenhearted, but not broken, Zoya summons her courage and makes a new life for herself. Message from Nam (1990) takes the lovely, intelligent Paxton Andrews from her native Savannah, Georgia, to her college years at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies journalism, and then to her life as a war correspondent in Vietnam. Paxton loses her first two loves to the war. When a third boyfriend is reported missing in action, Paxton abandons hope that he is still alive, but they finally find each other, and they take one of the last helicopters home from Saigon.

In Kaleidoscope (1987) and No Greater Love (1991) Steel turns her attention to the love shared by siblings. Kaleidoscope is the story of three young sisters who are separated after their father kills their mother in a jealous rage and then commits suicide; the girls grow up living completely different lives yet after many trials and tribulations they are eventually reunited. One of the sisters survives the horrors of rape and incest to become a powerful television network executive. No Greater Love concerns a twenty-one-year-old woman, Edwina Winfield, who takes it upon herself to care for her younger brothers and sisters after their parents die on the Titanic, a tragedy that also claims the life of Edwina's fiance. Edwina's burdens are eased by her family's wealth, but she nonetheless makes great sacrifices and endures much loneliness in an effort to keep her brothers and sisters together.

In a few of her novels, Steel shifts her focus to male characters. Fine Things (1987), for example, is about a department store executive, Bernard Fine, whose beloved wife dies from cancer a few years after their marriage, and Daddy (1989) describes the emotional recovery of Oliver Watson after his wife of eighteen years abandons him and their three children. Secrets (1985), another uncharacteristic novel, has six major characters, all of whom work on the set of a television soap opera.

While Steel can lay claim to one of the largest readerships in popular fiction, she is anything but a favorite among critics. Even when reviewers acknowledge that Steel is a commercial writer who does not pretend to write serious literature, they seem compelled to point out what they see as major weaknesses in her novels: bad writing, shallow characterization, preposterous plot twists, unconvincing dialogue, and rigid adherence to the "poor little rich girl" formula. Her novels are also faulted as being unrealistic because they focus on the lives of the wealthy and privileged. Critics reserve their harshest comments for Steel's prose style, which is generally considered to be sloppy and careless. A number of critics have expressed amazement that Steel's books do not undergo more extensive editing, and some have appeared to take delight in pointing out her run-on sentences, non sequiturs, and frequent repetition of certain words and phrases. In a review of Daddy, for example, Edna Stumpf remarked, "Ms. Steel plays with the themes of love and work like a child with a Barbie doll. She strips a life down, only to dress it up in billows of her famous free-associative prose, as scattered with commas as a Bob Mackie gown is with bugle beads." While some critics might prefer to dismiss Steel without comment, her enormous popularity makes her impossible to ignore. Beginning with her third hardcover, Crossings (1982), Steel's novels have received coverage in the New York Times Book Review. Steel responded to her critics in the Spring, 1987, issue of Booktalk: "Each book is different. I do historical plots, books about men, about women, about totally different things. I don't think the press likes big commercial authors. I have seen devastating reviews on my books, Jackie Collins', Judith Krantz', and Sidney Sheldon's books. We all get beaten up by the press. They usually pick a remote, esoteric writer to do the review, which is so unfair. There is obviously something to our books or millions of people wouldn't be buying them." Despite their low appraisals of Steel's talents as a writer, critics concede that her tear-jerking tragedies and happy endings meet some need in her millions of readers, be it a desire for satisfying diversion or for emotional catharsis.

Steel's fans have also been able to enjoy her stories in the form of television movies. In 1986 Crossings was presented as an ABC miniseries starring Cheryl Ladd, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Plummer; NBC made television movies from Kaleidoscope and Fine Things in 1990, and aired Palomino (1981), Changes (1983), and Daddy in 1991; a miniseries called Danielle Steel's "Zoya," with Melissa Gilbert and Bruce Boxleitner. Several of Steel's other novels, including Thurston House and Wanderlust (1986), have also been optioned for television films and miniseries.

After producing a score of romance novels, which have been generally dismissed by critics but almost always embraced by readers, Danielle Steel has distinguished herself as nothing less than "a publishing phenomenon," Jacqueline Briskin reports in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Since the publication of her first hardcover in 1980, Steel has consistently hit both hardback and paper back best-seller lists; there are reportedly over 125 million of her books in print. Her popularity has also spilled over into television, where film versions of her books appear regularly, garnering good ratings each time.

Steel's fiction is peopled by women in powerful or glamorous positions; often they are forced to choose the priorities in their lives. Thus in Changes a New York anchorwoman who weds a Beverly Hills surgeon must decide whether her career means more to her than her long-distance marriage does. And while reviewers seldom express admiration for the style of romantic novelists in general--Chicago Tribune Book World critic L. J. Davis claims that Changes is written in "the sort of basilisk prose that makes it impossible to tear your eyes from the page even as your brain is slowly [turning] to stone"--some reviewers, such as a Detroit News writer, find that the author's "flair for spinning colorful and textured plots out of raw material ... is fun reading. The topic [of Changes] is timely and socially relevant." Toronto Globe & Mail contributor Peggy Hill similarly concludes about 1988's Zoya: "Steel has the ability to give such formula writing enough strength to not collapse into an exhausted state of cliche. Zoya is a fine example of that achievement." As Steel revealed in an interview with Contemporary Authors, "I want to give [readers] entertainment and something to think about."

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Danielle Steel (1947-)
• At the time of Steel's birth:
• ASA ratings developed by the American Standards Association standardize U.S. film speeds
• "Steve Canyon" debuted on newspaper comic pages
• Oral Roberts, 29, was an Oklahoma faith healer
• John Steinbeck published The Wayward Bus
• Harry S Truman was president
• The times:
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1990-1991: Gulf War
• Steel's contemporaries:
• Nora Ephron (1941-) American writer
• Anne Tyler (1941-) American writer
• J. Danforth Quayle (1947-) American politician
• Nolan Ryan (1947-) American baseball player
• David Letterman (1947-) American comedian
• Stephen King (1947-) American writer
• Selected world events:
• 1949: General Mills and Pillsbury introduced prepared cake mixes
• 1955: Richard J. Daley began 21-year career as Chicago's mayor
• 1964: U.S. gasoline prices were 30.3 cents a gallon in October
• 1972: William Peter Blatty published The Exorcist
• 1978: President Carter facilitated peace talks between Egypt and Israel
• 1990: Lebanon's 15-year civil war ended
• 1996: Britain's Prince Charles and Lady Diana divorced

Further Reading

• Bestsellers 89, Issue 1, Gale, 1989.
• Bestsellers 90, Issue 4, Gale, 1991.
• Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1996; December 29, 1996.
• Chicago Tribune Book World, August 28, 1983.
• Detroit Free Press, December 1, 1989.
• Detroit News, September 11, 1983.
• Globe & Mail (Toronto), July 9, 1988.
• Library Journal, September 1, 1993; October 15, 1993.