Fern Michaels, who is originally known as Mary Ruth Kuczkir, grew up in Hasting, Pennsylvania, and is fondly known by family and friends as Dink. After her last child entered school, her husband forced her to get a job, when all Michaels knew was motherhood. Instead of approaching the world with no skills, she turned her love of reading into a career and began to write books. After four years of partnering with Ballantine Books in the production of her books, she left her agent, sold her home in New Jersey and moved to South Carolina, where she has remodeled a 300 hundred year old plantation house. Michaels books consist of scrappy heroines, much as she herself was, and the perserverance of the female soul. She considers her true day of prevailance, the epitome of her perseverance, to be the day she was inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame. In order to give back some of what she's received, Michaels has set up The Fern Michaels Foundation which allows grants of four year scholarships to needy students. She has also opened affordable pre-school and day care centers for single moms in financial distress. Michaels does not consider herself a writer, merely a good story teller, who has written sixty seven books, most of which appear on the New York Times Best Sellers List, such as Breaking News in 2012.