Francine Pascal, author of the Sweet Valley High book series, has died at age 92.
Pascal’s daughter Laurie Wenk-Pascal confirmed the news to The New York Times, noting that her mother died on Sunday, July 28, following a battle with lymphoma.
Born in New York City in 1932, Pascal was best known for creating Sweet Valley High, a series of young adult novels that debuted in 1983. The series followed identical twin sisters Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, who lived in the fictional Los Angeles suburb Sweet Valley. Pascal only wrote the first 12 books in the series, but she crafted outlines for most of the others.
The author, who began her career writing soap opera scripts, got the idea for Sweet Valley High after a friend noted that there was no teen version of the popular TV show Dallas. Pascal went home to start writing the detailed outline that became the first Sweet Valley High book.
“There are a lot of twins in my life. [My agent] Amy [Berkower] is a twin. My sister-in-law was a twin. People are always fascinated by twins. You’ll never be alone,” Pascal told Entertainment Weekly in 2019 while recalling the origin of Sweet Valley High. “I thought about it, and this other soap opera thing was in my head, the one that I couldn’t sell. 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.”
The series, which comprises nearly 200 books, ended in 2003 but was restarted in 2011 with a spinoff titled Sweet Valley Confidential that was authored by Pascal. A TV adaptation, starring real-life twins Brittany and Cynthia Daniel as the Wakefield sisters, aired from 1994 to 1997. At one point, Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody was attached to a film adaptation of the books, but that project never materialized.
“On one hand, [Sweet Valley High] is a guilty pleasure,” Cody, 46, told CBSNews.com in 2013. “And on the other hand, it’s a really interesting, psychological study of women and how we tend to compartmentalize ourselves as fun, boring, good or bad.”
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While Pascal was best known for Sweet Valley High, she was also the creator of the Fearless series, which followed a teenager named Gaia Moore who is incapable of feeling fear. The series consisted of 36 books and spawned a spinoff called Fearless FBI. A pilot episode starring Rachael Leigh Cook as Gaia was filmed in 2003, but the show wasn’t ordered to series.
Pascal is survived by two of her three daughters, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
