Sidney Sheldon
Novelist
American television writer who created such popular TV series as I Dream of Jeannie, The Patty Duke Show, and Hart to Hart. Also a bestselling novelist, he published Rage of Angels, Master of the Game, and The Other Side of Midnight during the 1970s and '80s.
He sold his first poem at the age of ten, and went on to attend East High School in Denver, Colorado. He later graduated from Northwestern University.
He wrote his first novel, The Naked Face, when he was forty-nine years old and quickly became one of the world's top selling authors.
He divorced his first wife, Jane Kaufman Harding, after three years of marriage. He remained married, however, to second wife Jorja Curtright from 1951 until her death in 1985. Finally, Alexandra Kostoff was Sheldon's wife from 1989 until his death at age eighty-nine. He had a daughter named Mary.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was also a their Illinois-born author.