Belva Plain, 1915–2010

Belva Plain wrote her first novel at an age when most people are contemplating retirement. Evergreen, the saga of a Polish immigrant girl torn between two men, was published in 1978, when Plain, 63, had already raised three children. It stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for 41 weeks in hardcover and another 20 in paperback, and was later made into an NBC miniseries.

Born Belva Offenberg in New York City, an only child, she graduated from Barnard College and sold her first story to Cosmopolitan at age 25. She quickly became a prolific writer of “formulaic tales” for women’s magazines about “wives who contemplate—and ultimately resist—extramarital temptation,” said The Washington Post. After marrying Dr. Irving Plain, an ophthalmologist, she settled in South Orange, N.J., and put her career on hold to raise her children. “I couldn’t have done both,” she said.

By the time Evergreen became an “overnight success,” Plain was a grandmother, said The New York Times. The novel introduced readers to the “strong-willed,” often red-haired Jewish heroines at the center of Plain’s passionate family sagas, which contained no explicit sex scenes. Plain, who has been described as “lady-like,” thought them vulgar. One critic called her books “easy, consoling works” that were “fat on plot and sentiment, thin in nearly every other way.” Plain wasn’t bothered. “Even the real geniuses, like Dostoyevsky, entertained,” she said.

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Plain, who never owned a computer, wrote her novels in longhand, said the Los Angeles Times. More than 28 million of her books are in print, including Random Winds, about a doctor haunted by three women, and Eden Burning, the story of a wealthy woman who becomes pregnant with her rapist’s child. Plain believed coming to novels late in life gave her a unique writer’s perspective. She said: “You see your grandchildren, you remember your grandparents, and there’s a sense of overall family continuance.”

Plain maintained a disciplined work schedule, writing five hours a day, four days a week, and published a novel about every two years until her last, Crossroads, in 2008. Shortly before her death, she finished a sequel to Evergreen, to be published in February.