Francine Pascal, ‘Sweet Valley High’ Creator, Dead at 92

Francine Pascal, the author of the long-running Sweet Valley High teen book series, has died. Pascal passed away in New York on Sunday, July 28 of lymphoma, her daughter, Laurie Wenk-Pascal, told The New York Times. She was 92.

A New York City native, Pascal studied journalism at New York University before going on to work for a variety of publications, including True Confessions and Cosmopolitan, and in the ’60s wrote for the soap opera The Young Marrieds alongside her husband John Pascal, who died in 1981. She went on to publish her first young adult novel, Hangin’ Out With Cici, in 1977.

It was more than five years later that Pascal created the Sweet Valley High series in 1983. She was inspired to write the series after a friend remarked that there was no teenage version of Dallas. Inspired by the thought, Pascal quickly wrote out a detailed sketch for the novel series about identical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, who went to high school in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Sweet Valley, one of “gently rolling hills” and a “fantastic white sand beach” nearby.

“Sweet Valley is the essence of high school,” Pascal told PEOPLE 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.”

While Pascal only wrote the first 12 books, the series grew to consist of 181 books, with Pascal writing the outline for most in the series.

“It was mostly very young, new writers,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “The story outlines weren’t chapter by chapter, more like acts: You get from here to here in the first quarter, then you have to get from here to here. 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 series concluded in 2003 and has sold over 200 million copies and has been translated into 27 languages. In 2011, a new adult novel series, Sweet Valley Confidential, was published, following the Wakefield sisters in their 30s. Sweet Valley High also inspired a TV series, starring real-life twins Cynthia and Brittany Daniel, which ran for four seasons from 1994 to 1997. A graphic novel called Sweet Valley Twins was published in 2022, per the BBC.

Pascal is survived by her two daughters, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.