Sweet Valley High author Francine Pascal has died at the age of 92 after a battle with cancer.
Pascal died of lymphoma at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on Sunday, her daughter Laurie Wenk-Pascal told the New York Times.
The beloved writer found global success with the hit book series about identical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, which was formative reading for generations of young girls.
The series, set in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Sweet Valley, debuted in 1983 and consisted of 181 books, also spawning multiple spin-offs, including Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley University.
It ran for 20 years and was translated into 27 languages, selling hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.
Sweet Valley High author Francine Pascal (pictured) has died at the age of 92
A Sweet Valley High TV series, starring real-life twins Cynthia and Brittany Daniel, (pictured on the show) ran for four seasons from 1994 to 1997
Pascal wrote the first 12 books in the Sweet Valley series and then, after drafting a detailed outline, worked with a team of writers to keep up a rapid publication pace.
Sweet Valley, according to Pascal, ‘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 told People Magazine in an interview in 1988.
The series, set in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Sweet Valley, debuted in 1983 and consisted of 181 books, also spawning multiple spin-offs, including Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley University
Pascal came up with the idea for Sweet Valley High after TV networks rejected her idea for a soap opera centered on teenagers in high school.
She was inspired by Dallas, the hit CBS soap that followed an affluent family and their oil empire, and the twins in her life, including her then-agent and sister-in-law.
‘People are always fascinated by twins. You’ll never be alone.’ she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019.
‘I sat down and I wrote a [character] bible and the first 12 [SVH] stories. It went quickly because it was such a fertile idea. Bantam Books loved it. They ordered all 12.’
Pascal had a ‘heavy hand’ in writing Double Love, the first Sweet Valley book, but reportedly had very little interest in writing the series herself because she ‘didn’t think there was going to be humor’ in teen books.
After she stopped writing the series herself, she used her so-called ‘character bible’, which she says dove ‘deeply into the lives of the twins and their backgrounds’, to help guide a team of ghost writers as they penned more stories.
‘The writers had to use those [guidelines] and follow them strictly,’ she recalled.
A Sweet Valley High TV series, starring real-life twins Cynthia and Brittany Daniel, ran for four series from 1994 to 1997.
Sweet Valley, according to Pascal, ‘is the essence of high school’. Pictured are Britney and Cynthia Daniel, alongside their castmates, in the Sweet Valley High TV show, circa 1994
Pascal was born in Manhattan on May 13, 1932, but grew up in Queens.
She studied journalism at New York University and then worked as a freelance writer for various publications including True Confessions, Modern Screen, Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Pascal’s writing career started to take off after she married her second husband John Pascal – a year after divorcing Jerome Offenberg – and the couple worked together on the 1960s soap opera The Young Marrieds.
In the 1970s she ventured into the world of young-adult novels with Hangin’ Out With Cici, My First Love And Other Disasters and The Hand-Me-Down Kid, and found that teenage girls were a receptive audience for her efforts.
Pascal, in an 1988 interview with People Magazine, praised the Sweet Valley series – which sold more than 200 million copies – because it ‘created readers out of non-readers’.
‘These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading,’ she said of the books.
Pascal also wrote several books for adults, including a non-fiction 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.
Pascal is survived by her two daughters Laurie and Susan, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
