Francine Pascal, the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series, has died. She was 92.
According to her sister, Laurie Wenk-Pascal, the author passed away of lymphoma at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on Sunday, per the New York Times.
The Post has reached out to Pascal’s agent.
Pascal was born on May 13, 1932 in Manhattan and raised in Queens. She studied journalism at New York University and then worked as a freelance writer for online websites.
Her first young adult novel, “Hangin’ Out With Cici,” was published in 1977 and adapted into a TV special, called “My Mother Was Never a Kid.”
Pascal and her husband, John Pascal, also wrote scripts for the soap opera “The Young Marrieds.”
In 1983, she published the first book in the “Sweet Valley High” series, which follows identical twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield who live in a fictional suburb in Los Angeles.
She previously spoke to Entertainment Weekly about how she was inspired to write the book series.
“A friend of mine had lunch with a [book] editor, a man, who said, ‘Why isn’t there a ‘Dallas’ for young people?’ I thought about it, and I actually had a book [proposal] due. There are a lot of twins in my life. People are always fascinated by twins. You’ll never be alone,’ ” Pascal said in 2019.
She continued, “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 stories. It went quickly because it was such a fertile idea. Bantam Books loved it. They ordered all 12.”
The “Sweet Valley High” series consisted of 181 books before concluding in 2003. In total, the series reportedly sold over 200 million copies worldwide.
Pascal wrote the first 12 books, after which she left a team of writers in charge to tell the story of the Wakefield twins.
“Sweet Valley Confidential” and “The Sweet Life,” which followed the characters as adults, were published in 2011 and 2012.
There was also a “Sweet Valley High” TV series starring twins Brittany Daniel and Cynthia Daniel. The show ran for four seasons from 1994 to 1997 in syndication and on UPN.
In her 2019 EW interview, Pascal revealed what she told the ghostwriters who took over the book series.
“‘Don’t do anything of yours — only do what I say.’ It’s true!” she said. “Because I trusted myself, and [the publisher] trusted me, and we just kept doing it.”
“It was mostly very young, new writers,” Pascal went on. “The story outlines weren’t chapter by chapter, more like acts. Don’t forget, they already had the bible, where I had written deeply into the lives of the twins and their backgrounds. With the characters, you knew what they liked, you knew what the walls in their room [looked like], every single thing about them. The writers had to use those [guidelines] and follow them strictly.”
Pascal’s other notable works included the “Fearless” book series, the novels “If Wishes Were Horses” and “The Ruling Class” and the psychological thriller “Save Johanna!”
Pascal was married to her husband John from 1965 until his death in 1981. He was 48 when he passed.
She’s survived by her two daughters, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
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