Francine Pascal, creator of ‘Sweet Valley High’ books, dies at 92

Francine Pascal, who became a fixture in the reading lives of a generation of adolescent girls as the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” books, a series that sold tens of millions of copies with it soapy plots involving the blond-haired twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, died July 28 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 92.

The cause was lymphoma, said her daughter Laurie Wenk-Pascal.

Ms. Pascal once made a living writing for a television soap opera. But she made her fortune as the mastermind of “Sweet Valley High,” a publishing sensation whose original series debuted in 1983, ended in 2003 and lived on in spinoffs and in the memory of readers who had beheld its varsity-lettered book covers.

The author, by her own account, did not aspire to a place in the pantheon of literature. She did aspire to a place in the hearts of her young fans, whom she aimed to keep hooked on books at a time in their lives when television, video games and other distractions threatened to pull them away.

Ms. Pascal, a New Yorker, had never been to California when she created the imaginary Los Angeles suburb that gave “Sweet Valley High” its name. She chose the setting because summer is “the best thing about your teenage years,” she once told CNN, and it’s “always summer” in California.

She was not a twin but was fascinated by twinhood because she perceived twins as never alone. Her fictional identical sisters, Elizabeth and Jessica, were opposites — Elizabeth, who worked on the high school newspaper, was a do-gooder, while Jessica, a cheerleader, most decidedly was not.

Many readers identified intensely with one sister or the other. But Ms. Pascal told the London Guardian that she intended the duality as a reminder that there are “two sides of one person, the good and the bad.”

Beginning with “Double Love,” and continuing through 180 subsequent titles, the “Sweet Valley High” series pulled readers from one installment to the next with cliffhangers and high school hallway drama.

“Sweet Valley is the essence of high school,” Ms. Pascal told People magazine in 1988. “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.”

There were limits to where the plots would go. As the author put it: The Wakefield sisters “don’t drink, they don’t use drugs, they don’t have abortions.”

Critics of “Sweet Valley High” objected to what they regarded as the blandness of the books and the formulaic nature of their plots. But the formula kept readers coming back — and kept Ms. Pascal on the bestseller lists for years.

Discerning readers noted that “Sweet Valley High” covers billed the books as “created” — not “written” — by Ms. Pascal. She wrote the first 12 volumes in the series and then began collaborating with a stable of ghostwriters who penned manuscripts in strict accordance with her outlines.

The writers, the Wall Street Journal reported in 1988, included over the years a former typist and a Harvard doctoral candidate.

“Their main job was to follow the pattern exactly,” Ms. Pascal wrote in a statement about her role in the series. “I can’t have any deviation, no matter how small because it can impact future stories. The better writers followed my outlines perfectly.”

“Sweet Valley High” spinoffs include the “Sweet Valley Twins” and “Sweet Valley Kids” series, set earlier in the lives of the Wakefield sisters, as well as “Sweet Valley Jr. High” and “Sweet Valley University.” Ms. Pascal caught up with the sisters in their late 20s in “Sweet Valley Confidential,” a novel that — in a testament to the nostalgia surrounding Sweet Valley — was a bestseller.

Francine Paula Rubin was born on May 13, 1932, in Manhattan and grew up in Queens. Her father was an auctioneer, and her mother managed the home. They gave their children — Francine and her two brothers — a secular Jewish upbringing.

Ms. Pascal enjoyed writing from a young age and was a devoted diarist. She used her journal to unload her fears and frustrations. The “Sweet Valley High” series, she told an interviewer years later, emerged from “what I fantasized high school was like for everyone but me.”

Ms. Pascal received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New York University in 1953. In the early years of her career, she did freelance writing for publications including True Confessions, Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal.

Her first book for young adults was “Hangin’ Out With Cici” (1977), about a rebellious girl who, amid a contentious relationship with her mother, travels back in time in a dream and discovers that she and her mother were not so different after all. Ms. Pascal published several other young-adult novels before creating “Sweet Valley High.”

She wrote across genres during her career. With her second husband, John Pascal, she was a screenwriter on the soap opera “The Young Marrieds”; she worked with her brother Michael Stewart on the musical “George M!,” about entertainer George M. Cohan; she wrote a nonfiction book about the Patty Hearst trial, “The Strange Case of Patty Hearst” (1974); and she published a fictionalized memoir, “If Wishes Were Horses,” in 1994.

Ms. Pascal’s first marriage, to Jerome Offenberg, ended in divorce. Their daughter Jamie Stewart died in 2008. John Pascal, whom Ms. Pascal married in 1964, died in 1981.

Survivors include two daughters from her first marriage, Laurie Wenk-Pascal of Manhattan and Los Angeles and Susan Johansson of Upper Saddle River, N.J; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

“I have gotten many, many letters from kids saying that they never read before ‘Sweet Valley High,’” Ms. Pascal told an interviewer, reflecting on the final legacy of her books.

“If nine out of 10 of those girls go on to read Judith Krantz and Danielle Steel, so be it, they are still reading,” she continued. “The reality is that not everyone is able, or wishes to read great literature. There should be books for all types of readers. Reading time is precious; it’s a time for privacy, fantasy, learning, a time to live in our imaginations. No one should be denied that.”