Francine Pascal, creator of ‘Sweet Valley High’ book series, dead at 92

nypost.com:

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.