The irreverent and optimistic bounty hunter stars in her most popular series, as well as a secondary series comprised of holiday novellas with supernatural themes. While she continues to write about a large variety of characters that make up different series of books, her most loved character and the character on whom the majority of her books focus is Stephanie Plum. The Stephanie Plum Series Contains 25 Books (and Counting!)Įvanovich has been publishing successfully for years with numerous books reaching the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list. Though her romance novels were not as well received as her adventure stories, a number of them have been re-released due to interest from fans. She eventually made the switch to adventure novels, joking that after a while she simply ran out of sexual positions to describe. She continued to publish under that pseudonym and her own name for years. Her first published novel, Hero at Large (1987), was published in 1982 under the pen name Steffie Hall. While today Evanovich is known for her romantic adventure novels, her first published works were squarely rooted in the romance genre. She found success when she turned instead toward work that embraced this optimism and fed into her belief that more can be learned from good experiences than bad ones, and that good people simply like to read about good things happening to other good people. While she saw this as a setback at the time, Evanovich has since said that the reason these books didn't work for publishers and didn't really work for her was because she was not embracing the humor her readers love about her work.Įvanovich, like her character Stephanie Plum, is an optimist. Her disappointment in these early failures was so strong that she literally piled her rejections and manuscripts into a suitcase and burned them.

She eventually shelved that dream and focused instead on writing other genres. But in the end, none of those novels worked out. Her goal was to write the 'Great American Novel' and she labored away at books she hoped would be just that for nearly ten years. In celebration of this writer's amazing career, here are five things you might not know about one of America's most loved adventure novelists.įor years, Evanovich struggled to become a writer. Her novels are published all over the world and have been translated into over 40 languages. A prolific writer, she has published over sixty novels, many of which have topped the New York Times Best Sellers list. Evanovich has become a household name thanks to her much beloved adventure series featuring bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. Janet Evanovich was born in South River, New Jersey in 1943.

Janet evanovich five