The creator of the series that inspired the love of reading in so many Gen X’ers has died.
Francine Pascal, creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series died at the age of 92 on Sunday.
Her daughter confirmed Pascal’s death at New York-Presbyterian Hospital from lymphoma to The New York Times.
Deadline said Pascal was born in 1932 and grew up in Jamaica, Queens. She attended New York University, studied journalism and started her writing career as a freelancer for “True Confessions” and “Cosmopolitan” among other publications.
She then changed to a different medium, writing for soap operas with her husband and eventually for Broadway, co-authoring the musical “George M!”
Pascal wrote a book “Hangin’ Out With Cici,” the first of three books in the Victoria Martin series. The first book was adapted into the ABC Afterschool Special “My Mother Was Never a Kid,” Entertainment Weekly reported.
Between the “Cici” book and her novel “The Hand-Me-Down Kid,” Pascal pitched a high school teenager soap opera, but networks passed, because she said, they thought “it was too girly.”
Pascal became a household name with the popular “Sweet Valley High” young-adult novels, the Times reported. The series focused on Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, identical twins who navigated growing up in the Los Angeles suburbs.
Starting with “Double Love” published in 1983, Pascal wrote the first dozen books of the series before collaborating and eventually overseeing writing teams that expanded the story. The original series ended in 2003, Deadline reported.
The Times said she would give the team a detailed outline who used that along with the “bible” she developed that spelled out the characters, settings and relationships that drove the fictional community.
“Sweet Valley High” was translated into 27 languages and sold 150 million copies, Entertainment Weekly reported.
The series had 181 titles, the Times reported.
It also spawned “The Sweet Valley Confidential” and “The Sweet Life” in 2011 and 2012 respectively, following the Wakefield twins as adults. There was also a four-season television show that ran in syndication and UPN.
Pascal challenged those who discounted the world she had built.
“These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading,” she told People magazine in 1988. “I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to ‘War and Peace,’ but we have created readers out of nonreaders. If they go on to Harlequin romances, so what? They’re going to read.”
Pascal leaves behind two daughters, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, according to Entertainment Weekly.
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