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| Francine Pascal | |
Francine Pascal, "a former soap-opera scriptwriter from Queens who conjured up an entire literary universe among the blue-eyed cheerleaders and square-jawed jocks of suburban Los Angeles, most notably in her long-running and mega-best-selling Sweet Valley High series of young-adult novels," died July 28, the New York Times reported. She was 92.
Noting that the books are "strikingly innocent," the Times wrote: "Even as the thoughtful Elizabeth and the scheming Jessica clash over boys, friends and spots on the cheerleading team, drugs, alcohol and sex barely permeate the 181 titles in Sweet Valley High, or the scores of others in the spinoffs--and the spinoffs of spinoffs--from the series."
Within a few years of its debut in 1983 with Double Love, the Sweet Valley High books had taken over the YA market. In January 1986, 18 out of the top 20 books in B. Dalton's YA bestseller list were titles from the series, and overall more than 200 million copies of Sweet Valley titles have been sold. The series also revolutionized YA publishing. Pascal told the Los Angeles Times in 1986: "There are millions of teenagers that no one in publishing knew existed."
She wrote the first 12 books herself, then worked with a team of writers to keep a steady, rapid publication pace, often a book a month. The Times noted that she "would draft a detailed outline, then hand it to a writer to flesh out while relying on what Ms. Pascal called her 'bible'--a compendium of descriptions of the personalities, settings and dense web of relationships that defined life in Sweet Valley."
"I can't have any deviation, no matter how small, because it can impact future stories," she told her daughter, Susan Johansson, in an e-mail shortly before her death. "The better writers follow my outlines perfectly."
Though she wrote several books before starting the Sweet Valley series, including a nonfiction account of the Patty Hearst trial, Pascal first made her name writing for the 1960s soap opera The Young Marrieds with her husband, John Pascal.
She had studied journalism at New York University, then worked as a freelance writer for magazines like True Confessions, Modern Screen, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal. When the producers of The Young Marrieds insisted that the Pascals relocate from New York to Los Angeles, they quit and returned to journalism. Francine Pascal also collaborated with her brother, Tony-winning playwright Michael Stewart, on the book for the musical George M!.
Pascal wrote her first YA novels in the late 1970s, beginning with Hangin' Out With Cici (1977), which was made into an afternoon TV special; My First Love and Other Disasters (1979); and The Hand-Me-Down Kid (1980).
She was "trying her hand at a soap opera treatment, and failing miserably, when an editor friend related a story. The friend had been at lunch when another editor asked why there was no teenage version of Dallas, the prime-time soap opera that was among the biggest hits on television at the time," the Times wrote.
Pascal immediately wrote a detailed sketch about twin girls in high school, which she sold, along with her first 12 books, to Bantam Books. Spinoff series quickly followed: Sweet Valley Twins began in 1986, followed by Sweet Valley Kids, The Unicorn Club (a spinoff of Sweet Valley Twins), Sweet Valley Junior High, Sweet Valley High: Senior Year and Sweet Valley University.
The Sweet Valley series ended in 2003, but restarted in 2011 with Sweet Valley Confidential, set 10 years after the world of Sweet Valley High. Pascal also wrote two adult novels, Save Johanna! (1981) and If Wishes Were Horses (1994), a fictionalized memoir about her life with her husband. In 1999, she began yet another YA series called Fearless.
"These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading," she told People magazine. "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."