Judith McNaught

Judith McNaught (born May 10, 1944, in San Luis Obispo, California) is an American romance novelist widely credited with helping shape the modern historical-romance genre. Before turning to fiction, she held a series of unrelated jobs -- assistant film-crew director, assistant controller at a trucking company, and reportedly the first female executive producer at a CBS radio station -- and studied business at Northwestern University. She wrote her breakout manuscript, Whitney, My Love, between 1978 and 1982, but sold the shorter contemporary romance Tender Triumph first in 1983; Whitney, My Love finally reached print in 1985 and became the foundation of her Westmoreland Saga.

McNaught built a run of bestselling historical romances through the late 1980s (the Sequels trilogy, A Kingdom of Dreams, Until You) before shifting to contemporary romantic suspense in the 1990s with the Paradise (Second Opportunities) series and the Foster Family books, several of which reached the New York Times bestseller list; more than thirty million copies of her books are in print. Her second husband, Michael McNaught, bought her the typewriter she wrote on and died in an accident the day before she received her first book cover. After Every Breath You Take (2005), McNaught's output slowed dramatically -- her next and, to date, most recent novel, The Sweetest Thing, did not appear until 2019 -- and she has published nothing new since. She has lived in Frisco, Texas, and has been involved in children's charities, breast-cancer causes, and literacy promotion.