Francine Pascal: Last News

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.

Francine Pascal, the author whose “Sweet Valley High” series of young-adult novels became a cultural touchstone for generations of middle- and high-school readers beginning in the 1980s, died Sunday at Manhattan’s at New York-Presbyterian Hospital of lymphoma. She was 92.

K.J. Yossman Francine Pascal, the author best known for creating hit teen book series “Sweet Valley High,” has died. She was 92.

Alvin Deutsch, the attorney who represented singer Peggy Lee in her landmark victory over Walt Disney Productions and more recently tangled with Broadway producer Scott Rudin and the estate of author Harper Lee over rights to a stage production of To Kill A Mockingbird, died Oct. 6 at his home in New York City. He was 89.