Francine Pascal, a former soap opera writer from Queens who created an entire literary universe among the blue-eyed cheerleaders and square-jawed jocks of suburban Los Angeles, notably in her bestselling young-adult novel series “Sweet Valley High,” died Sunday in Manhattan. She was 92.
His daughter, Laurie Wenk-Pascal, said the death, which occurred at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by lymphoma.
With covers instantly recognizable by their varsity-style lettering and fuzzy illustrations, the “Sweet Valley High” books captivated a generation of teenage readers with the lives of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, identical twins attending high school in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Sweet Valley.
The twins are “the sweetest, most dazzling 16-year-old girls you could ever imagine,” Ms. Pascal told People magazine in 1988. They, and the books, are also strikingly innocent: Even as thoughtful Elizabeth and Machiavellian Jessica clash over boys, friends and spots on the cheerleading squad, drugs, alcohol and sex barely permeate the 181 titles of “Sweet Valley High,” or the dozens more in the series’ spin-offs — and spin-offs of spin-offs.
Within a few years of its debut in 1983, Sweet Valley High had taken the young adult book market by storm. By January 1986, 18 of the top 20 books on B. Dalton’s Young Adult Best Seller List were Sweet Valley High titles. In total, the Sweet Valley universe has sold over 200 million copies.
This behemoth revolutionized young adult publishing. While there was no shortage of books aimed at teens—and teen girls in particular—Pascal recognized their endless hunger for captivating stories and developed a way to feed them.
“There are millions of teenagers that no one in the publishing world knew existed,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1986.
Pascal wrote the first 12 books in the series, then worked with a team of authors to maintain a steady, rapid pace of publication, often one book a month. She would write a detailed outline, then pass it on to an author to expand on, drawing on what Pascal called her “bible”—a compendium of descriptions of the personalities, environments and dense web of relationships that defined life in Sweet Valley.
“I cannot deviate from my principles, no matter how small, because it can impact future stories,” she told her daughter Susan Johansson in an email shortly before her death. “The best writers follow my outlines perfectly.”
Ms. Pascal had never been to Southern California when the first books appeared, starting with “Double Love,” in which the Wakefield twins compete for the same boy, a basketball star named Todd Wilkins.
These debuts also introduced readers to the idyllic world of Sweet Valley.
“Everything was wonderful: the gently rolling hills, the quaint town centre and the fantastic white sand beach just fifteen minutes away,” Pascal wrote.
More broadly, these early books familiarized readers outside Southern California with the Valley Girl aesthetic that would resonate in pop culture for decades, shaping speech patterns (speaking loudly, using “like” as a filler word), clothing, and a long list of television shows, movies, and books that it’s impossible to imagine without Ms. Pascal’s influence.
Although she had written several books before starting the Sweet Valley series, including a nonfiction account of the Patty Hearst trial, Pascal first came to prominence writing for the 1960s soap opera “The Young Marrieds” with her husband, John Pascal. The influence of the television genre was reflected in the contours of the Sweet Valley books, with their convoluted, gossip-fueled plots, melodramatic twists and suspenseful endings.
She insisted, however, that the books were at heart morality tales, instructing readers in the intricacies of life and illustrating a sense of idealism and wonder that she believed embodied the universal experience of adolescents, whether in urban Queens or sunny Southern California.
“I loved the idea of high school as a microcosm of the real world,” Pascal told the Guardian in 2012. “And what I really liked about it was how it moved away from Sleeping Beauty romances, where the girl has to wait for the hero. I decided it was going to be a very different kind of girl story – and it is.”
Francine Paula Rubin was born on May 13, 1932, in Manhattan, to William and Kate (Dunitz) Rubin, and raised in Jamaica, Queens. Her father was an auctioneer.
After studying journalism at New York University, she worked as a freelance writer for gossip magazines like True Confessions and Modern Screen, and then for outlets like Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Her first marriage, to Jérôme Offenberg, ended in divorce in 1963. A year later, she married M. Pascal; he died in 1981.
Her two daughters, Ms. Wenk-Pascal and Ms. Johansson, are from her first marriage, as is a third, Jamie Stewart, who died in 2008. Ms. Pascal, who lived most of her adult life in Midtown Manhattan, is also survived by six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
She and Mr. Pascal did well as soap opera writers, but they weren’t particularly interested in the work. When the producers of “The Young Marrieds” insisted they move to Los Angeles, they quit and returned to journalism.
The two later collaborated with his brother, Tony Award-winning playwright Michael Stewart, on the book for “George M!”, a critically acclaimed musical about Broadway impresario George M. Cohan.
Pascal wrote her first young adult novels in the late 1970s, beginning with “Hangin’ Out With Cici” (1977), about a young girl who travels back in time to meet her mother as a teenager. The novel was adapted into a television special and spawned a sequel. Pascal also wrote the young adult novels “My First Love and Other Disasters” (1979) and “The Hand-Me-Down Kid” (1980).
She was trying to make a soap opera, and failing miserably, when an editor friend told her a story. The friend was having lunch when another editor asked him why there wasn’t a teen version of “Dallas,” the prime-time soap opera that was one of the biggest hits on television at the time.
Pascal ran home and immediately made a detailed sketch of high school twins; she sold it, along with her first 12 books, to Bantam Books (which later became an imprint of Random House).
Spin-off series came quickly: “Sweet Valley Twins,” about girls at Wakefield Middle School, debuted in 1986, followed by “Sweet Valley Kids,” “The Unicorn Club” (a “Sweet Valley Twins” spin-off), “Sweet Valley Junior High,” “Sweet Valley High: Senior Year” and “Sweet Valley University.”
The “Sweet Valley” series ended in 2003, but resumed in 2011 with “Sweet Valley Confidential,” which takes place 10 years after the action of “Sweet Valley High.”
Ms. Pascal also wrote two novels for adults, “Save Johanna!” (1981) and “If Wishes Were Horses” (1994), a fictionalized memoir about her life with Mr. Pascal.
In 1999, she began another young adult series called Fearless, which centers on a girl named Gaia Moore who was born without the “fear gene”; she is a crack shotgunner and a black belt in karate, skills she uses to fight crime (and, in a spin-off series, in her job as an FBI agent).
Although some critics criticized the utopian settings and fanciful plots of her books, Pascal had no qualms.
“These books have revealed a whole population of young girls who never read,” she told People. “I don’t know if they’re all going to read War and Peace, but we’ve made readers out of the ones who didn’t read. If they read Harlequin novels, what does it matter? They’re going to read.”