Catherine Coulter

Coulter grew up on a horse ranch in Cameron County, Texas. Her grandmother, who died at the young age of 37, was also a writer. Her father was a painter and singer, and her mother is a retired concert pianist. Coulter wrote her first two novels, fifteen pages each, when she was fourteen. While a freshman at the University of Texas, Coulter wrote poetry. After earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, Coulter attended Boston College and earned a master's degree in early 19th-century European history.
She took a job as a speechwriter for a Wall Street executive. As her own husband was then a medical student, she spent many of her evenings alone, reading romance novels. One night when they were home together, she found herself in the middle of a particularly bad book and threw it across room, asserting that even she could do better. Her husband challenged her to prove h…