The TIME 100

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Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts

By Andrea Sachs
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Nora Roberts is to love as Masters and Johnson are to sex. As the world's leading romance writer, she has inspected, dissected, deconstructed, explored, explained and extolled the passions of the human heart since 1981. Millions of devoted (primarily, but not exclusively, female) readers have had their fantasy lives shaped by her work; she can make romance seem fresh and hopeful every time. And there have been many, many times. At 56, she makes her fellow authors look like slackers, having written 175 novels, the majority of them best sellers. There are nearly 300 million copies of her books in print. Befitting her career choice, Roberts fell in love with and married a carpenter who went to do some work on her house. And they lived happily ever after. The end.

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