Stephenie Meyer began to write Twilight on the first day after a vivid dream she had about a young woman and a very handsome vampire in a field discussing their love for each other and the problem of the vampire’s hunger for her scent and her blood. She worked on Twilight, which she originally had titled Forks, in her spare time. She had studied literature in college and had taken a creative writing course, so she had enough background to judge that her work was publishable. She researched how to get it published and then got an agent, who quickly procured an offer for the book.
Twilight, Meyer’s first novel in the series of the same name, centers around Bella, a teenage girl, and Edward, a vampire, who are in love. All four novels in the series tell the story from Bella's point of view. Meyer contemplated a parallel series telling the same story from Edward's point of view (see Orson Scott Card's Ender series), but the unauthorized release of a partial draft led her to pursue new writing projects.
Twilight was on The New York Times bestseller list for one week when it was first published, and it has now, along with its sequels, sold over forty million copies worldwide. It has been published in over thirty foreign countries and has been made into a movie.