Francine Pascal, the creator of the Sweet Valley High book series, has died. She was 92.
Her daughter Laurie Wenk-Pascal said she died of lymphoma at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on Sunday, July 28, The New York Times reports. PEOPLE reached out to Pascal’s publisher.
Born in Manhattan on May 13, 1932, Pascal grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and found success with the young adult series in 1983. Pascal created Sweet Valley High, which consisted of 181 books, and wrote the first 12 books. Soon, a team of writers would maintain the stories of identical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Sweet Valley.
“Sweet Valley is the essence of high school. It’s that moment before reality hits, when you really do believe in the romantic values — sacrifice, love, loyalty, friendship — before you get jaded and slip off into adulthood,” she said of the series in an interview with PEOPLE in 1988.
Francine Pascal/Facebook
Before Sweet Valley High hit shelves, Pascal studied journalism at New York University. She then worked as a freelance writer for True Confessions, Modern Screen, Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal.
She married her first husband Jerome Offenberg, and the two divorced in 1963. The former couple shared three daughters. Their daughter Jamie Stewart died in 2008.
Pascal later married John Pascal a year after her and Offenberg’s divorce. The two had been working together on the 1960s soap opera The Young Marrieds, which jumpstarted Francine’s writing career, and were together when he died in 1981. Speaking with PEOPLE in 1988, Francine remembered her late husband as “a lovely man, a wonderful father, a beautiful writer.”
In addition to writing for the small screen, Pascal wrote several books for adults, including one nonfiction book about the Patty Hearst trial, The Strange Case of Patty Hearst, in 1974. She also penned adult novels Save Johanna! in 1981 and If Wishes Were Horses in 1994, a fictionalized memoir about her life with her late husband, John.
By the late 1970s, she ventured into the world of young-adult novels with Hangin’ Out With Cici in 1977 — which later received a sequel and was developed into an afternoon TV special. Then, in 1979, she released My First Love and Other Disasters and the following year, The Hand-Me-Down Kid.
Random House
Then, after one conversation with another editor, Pascal was inspired to write a teenage version of the hit CBS series Dallas and quickly learned she had a hit on her hands with Sweet Valley High.
The hit book series followed Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, whom she described to PEOPLE as “the most adorable, dazzling 16-year-old girls imaginable.” After she wrote the first 12 books, several spinoffs followed, including Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley Kids and Sweet Valley Junior High.
The book series, which would go on to sell 200 million copies, focused on a specific demographic of readers: teenage girls. During her 1988 conversation with PEOPLE, Pascal said, “These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading. I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to War and Peace, but we have created readers out of non-readers. If they go on to Harlequin romances, what? They’re going to read.”
After she stopped writing the books herself, she would draft outlines for other writers to follow and rely on her “bible,” which described the characters and their inner webs throughout the hundreds of books.
The Sweet Valley series first ended in 2003 — 20 years after its debut. But in 2011, it restarted with Sweet Valley Confidential, set 10 years after Sweet Valley High.
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Pascal is also survived by her two daughters, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
