Judith McNaught

Judith Spaeth was born in May 10, 1944 in San Luis Obispo, California, USA, and grew up all over the country, the oldest of three children of an appliance-store franchiser and a housewife. Before majored in Business at Northwestern University, Judy married with a dentist from St. Louis, Missouri, and they had two children, a daugther, Whitney (b. 1967), and a son, Clay (1969). But the marriage didn't work out, and at 25, she became a divorced mother to two.

She worked as comptroller of a major trucking company and was the first female executive producer at a CBS radio station. In 1974, while working as an assistant director on a TV-commercial film crew in St. Louis, she met an advertising director at General Motors, Michael McNaught, a divorced father of five. The pair married later that year and moved with her children to a Detroit suburb. Judy devoted herself to homemaking and slowly went little crazy. She started to read in her spare time, and she bought by accident her first romance: "The Flame and the Flower" by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, and she loved it. With her husband encouragement, who buying her a new typewriter, she decided to try writing a novel herself in 1978. She wrote her first manuscript, "Whitney, My Love", a historical novel with the names of her childrens as protagonist, but she cannot found a publisher.