Author Francine Pascal, whose massively popular Sweet Valley High series broke new ground—and several records—in the YA publishing realm, died July 28 at a Manhattan hospital of lymphoma. She was 92.
Pascal was born Francine Paula Rubin on May 13, 1932, in New York City and grew up mostly in Jamaica, Queens, where her family moved when she was five. As a child, she was a big fan of comic books, fairy tales, and going to the local movie theater to see the Saturday afternoon double feature. She also had already begun writing at around age eight, poetry at first. “I also liked writing plays, casting and directing my friends for everyone in the neighborhood,” she said in an interview with Something About the Author.
Though Pascal took pride in being praised by her teachers and classmates for her writing, she did not always enjoy being in school. “I absolutely hated high school,” she recalled in SATA. “Learning by rote made the whole system repressive. I couldn’t wait to go to college.”
Pursuing her goal of higher education, she studied journalism at New York University at a time when the surrounding Greenwich Village neighborhood was “filled with poets and musicians... and very ‘beat,’ ” Pascal said. “I was writing poetry and felt very much a part of it all.”
In 1964, she married newspaper journalist John Pascal who wrote for the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, and Newsday. “He was an excellent writer, and in many ways my mentor,” she noted. “He loved everything I wrote and encouraged me unceasingly.”
Pascal launched her own writing career in the mid-1960s as a freelancer producing articles for such magazines as True Confessions and Modern Screen and later for Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan. She changed gears in 1965 when she and her husband were hired as a team to write for the ABC-TV daytime soap opera The Young Marrieds. The TV writing gig ended after six months, but not their collaborative work. The Pascals joined forces with Francine’s brother, award-winning playwright Michael Stewart, to write the book for the musical George M!, which had a successful Broadway run in 1968–69. And in 1974, the Pascals adapted John’s extensive reporting on the Patty Hearst trial in San Francisco into the book The Strange Case of Patty Hearst (New American Library), which they completed under a crash 30-day deadline to be first to the market.
The idea to write for younger readers came to Pascal not in a dream, exactly, but while she was lying in bed one morning. “What if a 13-year-old girl who didn’t like her mother very much went back in time and became her mother’s best friend?” she remembered musing. Her husband encouraged her to chase the idea and “sit right down and begin writing,” she said in SATA. The result was the novel Hangin’ Out with Cici (Viking, 1977) which she submitted to several agents, earning a book contract in just two weeks. The book performed well and was adapted as the ABC Afterschool Special My Mother Was Never a Kid in 1981.
Pascal turned out two other well-received novels before tackling something altogether different in the early 1980s. She had been mulling the idea of a soap-opera style series for teenagers for a while, but the concept didn’t begin to jell until an editor had mentioned to Pascal that another editor friend was hoping to find something like a teenage version of the TV show Dallas. Pascal was jolted by that thought and soon constructed the fictional world of Sweet Valley High, the suburban L.A. backdrop for the busy lives of blonde identical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. “When I came up with the idea for Elizabeth and Jessica, the Jekyll and Hyde twins, I was off and running,” Pascal said. Bantam bought the series based on Pascal’s six-page proposal, and published the inaugural three titles Double Love, Secrets, and Playing with Fire in fall 1983.
Sweet Valley High quickly became a phenomenon. Pascal wrote the initial 12 books of the series herself, but then became the guiding creative force behind a team of ghostwriters who produced up to five books a month as the series sprouted numerous spin-offs, including Sweet Valley Twins (launched in 1986), Sweet Valley Kids (which spawned its own offshoot, Unicorn Club), Sweet Valley Junior High, Sweet Valley High: Senior Year, and Sweet Valley University. By 2023, more than 700 titles in the series had been published and there are more than 250 million copies of series titles in print around the world. “I do all the plot outlines, descriptions of characters, time, setting, and so forth,” she said, describing how the series machine worked. I maintain artistic control over every aspect of these novels. I may not write every word, but they are very much mine.”
In 1985, Perfect Summer, the initial Sweet Valley High super edition, became the first YA novel to land on the New York Times bestseller list. “These books are romances in the classic sense,” Pascal told a SATA interviewer. “They deal with the ideals of love, honor, friendship, sacrifice, which account for their popularity.”
Though the original series officially ended in 2003, it was resurrected in 2011 in Sweet Valley Confidential, which picks up 10 years after the action of the Sweet Valley High books. And in 2022, Random House Graphic announced its plans to publish the Sweet Valley Twins series in graphic novel format and released the first volume, Sweet Valley Twins #1: Best Friends.
In all, Pascal had a creative hand in more than 700 Sweet Valley books, in addition to the more than 40 titles in the Fearless series that launched in 1999, featuring the abandoned teen daughter of a CIA terrorism expert, and several stand-alone YA, middle grade, and adult novels.
Beverly Horowitz, former senior v-p and publisher of Delacorte Press, was Pascal’s editor at Bantam in the early days of Sweet Valley High. “Francine truly respected her readers,” she said. “That’s one of the things that makes the books withstand the test of time. She knew there was a need for kids to feel comfortable reading and she knew how her stories of friendship, sisterhood, family, and high school issues would hit with her audience. Her books have had an enormous impact on generations of readers. Even today, if you find someone who has read Sweet Valley High, they’ll ask, ‘Were you a Jessica or an Elizabeth?’ Francine understood how you can be pulled in two directions and that we’re all probably a little bit of both.”
Author Karen M. McManus shared these words of appreciation: “I grew up reading Sweet Valley High books. I couldn’t get enough of Liz and Jess, and I’m so thankful to Francine Pascal for creating a world that captured so many of the highs and lows of young adulthood.”
Whitney Leopard, executive editor at Random House Graphic, offered this remembrance: “On my first phone call with Francine about bringing her world of Sweet Valley to life in graphic novel form, we bonded over two specific things: the fact that I am a twin, and that we both understood how important it was to make sure these Sweet Valley adaptations stayed true to the heart of the series. Francine was a brilliant writer and a hard worker, and she loved her family and spoke of them often. She was thrilled to see the Sweet Valley Twins graphic novels reach new readers as well as established fans, and she was a joy to work with. Her influence on this industry is undeniable, and I will be forever grateful for her amazing stories and for her ceaseless love for readers.”
And Wendy Loggia, VP and publisher at Delacorte Press, who was also part of Sweet Valley High’s heyday at Bantam, paid tribute: “Francine knew exactly what readers wanted—sisterly love and rivalry, romance, friendship drama, secret diaries, evil twins—and leaves behind a generation of grateful readers, many who grew up to work in publishing. I’m one of them. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I was given not one but five Sweet Valley series to assist on—Sweet Valley Kids, Sweet Valley Twins, The Unicorn Club, SVH, and SVU. It was always an exciting day when one of the cover paintings was delivered to the Bantam offices—yes, actual paintings would arrive with Jessica, Elizabeth and their friends involved in their next exciting adventure. Years later Francine came in for a pizza lunch open to everyone at RHCB, where we wore our lavalier necklaces, reminisced and laughed, she told stories to a rapt audience, signed books new and old—it was clear we were in the presence of a publishing legend. What a privilege to learn from one of the very best.”
