Francine Pascal

Francine Paula Pascal (née Rubin, May 13, 1932 – July 28, 2024) was an American author best known for her Sweet Valley series of young adult novels. Sweet Valley High, the backbone of the collection, was made into a television series, which led to several spin-offs, including The Unicorn Club and Sweet Valley University. Although most of these books were published in the 1980s and 1990s, they remained so popular that several titles were re-released decades later.

Francine Paula Rubin was born on May 13, 1932, in Manhattan, New York, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York. She was the daughter of Kate (Dunitz) and William Rubin, an auctioneer. Her family was Jewish. She studied journalism at New York University and began her career writing for magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Modern Screen, and True Confessions.

In 1958, she married Jerome Offenberg until divorcing in 1963. In 1964, she married John Pascal until his death in 1981.

Francine and John Pascal were hired as writers for the soap opera The Young Marrieds. They left the show after being asked to leave New York for Los Angeles to continue working. The couple later wrote a Broadway musical, George M!, with her brother Michael Stewart.

Pascal's first novel, Hangin' Out With Cici (1977), was later turned into an ABC Afterschool Special, My Mother Was Never a Kid. Around this time, she aspired to create a soap opera, but struggled to come up with an idea. One day, a friend who worked in publishing gave her the idea for a series aimed at teenagers, which Pascal immediately responded to and developed as a book. This became the successful Sweet Valley High series, set in the fictitious Southern California town of Sweet Valley. After writing the first seven books herself, she oversaw a team of ghostwriters to expand the series. Sweet Valley High continued in numerous iterations until 2003, and was briefly revived with the novel Sweet Valley Confidential in 2011.

Pascal later developed other work, including the Fearless series, Save Johanna! (1981) and The Ruling Class.

Pascal had three children from her marriage to Offenberg. Her daughter, Jamie Stewart Carmen, was an NBC producer who died in 2008.

John Pascal died of lung cancer in 1981. Francine Pascal later wrote the novel If Wishes Were Horses (1994), a work of autofiction about her marriage and widowhood, in which the protagonist moves to France following the death of her husband.

Pascal died of lymphoma at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on July 28, 2024, at the age of 92.