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Ruth Jean Dale

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Betty Lee Duran was born on 1942 in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, U.S.A. She was the first of four children, and lived there for her first 12 years, at which point, her father went to work for a construction company building highways all over the U.S.A. As a child of ten or eleven, Betty Lee began writing her first book, a sequel of "Black Stallion" by Walter Farley, her very favorite. Fortunately for the young author, she was completely unaware of the law regarding plagiarism. She attended seven schools in three states during the seventh grade alone. By the time she graduated from high school, she'd also lived or attended school in South Dakota, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey. She obtained her Journalism Major in a college in Missouri. Betty Lee also spend a stint in the U.S. Navy, where she met her husband, a U.S. Marine. She settled down to life as a wife and mother of four daughters in Illinois, California, and Texas. Eventually she went to work as a newspaper reporter; upon retirement from the Corps, her husband became a reporter for the same California daily. Just before Thanksgiving 1984, she was felled by a brain aneurysm which resulted in three brain surgeries, two weeks in a coma, four weeks in Intensive Care, and a recovery so complete that her surgeon called it "a miracle." From this experience she learned, among other things, that a bad hair day is preferable to a no-hair day. Yes, her hair eventually did grow back. On July 8, 1988, a day she'll never forget, Betty Lee sold her first romance novel to Harlequin as Ruth Jean Dale. More sales followed and the next year she quit her day job as editor of two weekly newspapers to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing full-time. Ruth Jean Dale's books have been translated in many foreign languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Polish, and soon--Russian and Chinese. She's made frequent appearances on romance best seller lists, and was nominated a "Top Ten Favorite