Fern Michaels, a mother of five in suburban New Jersey who responded to her husband’s request to get a job by taking up writing, only to blossom into a best-selling author of more than 200 romances and thrillers, died on Nov. 12 at her home in Summerville, S.C. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Suzy Jensen.
The “grande dame of women’s fiction,” as Publishers Weekly once called her, Ms. Michaels sold an estimated 150 million books, including bodice rippers, family dramas and mysteries, according to Kensington Publishing, her longtime publisher. Her work has been translated into 20 languages.
In her early years, Ms. Michaels wrote with a partner, Roberta Anderson, but took legal control of the pen name in 1989 and adopted it as her public persona in interviews. Her actual name was Mary Kuczkir.
She was best known for the sprawling Sisterhood series, a collection of 36 romantic thrillers, starting with “Weekend Warriors” (2003), that focuses on a tight-knit group of vigilante-minded women who, with steely resolve, set out to right the wrongs of the legal system.
As Ms. Michaels often described it, it took a steely resolve to embark on a writing career in her 40s. “When my youngest went off to kindergarten,” she recounted on her website, “my husband told me to get off my ass and get a job. Those were his exact words. I didn’t know how to do anything except be a wife and mother.”
“Rather than face the outside world with no skills,” she added, “I decided to write a book. As my husband said at the time, stupid is as stupid does. Guess what, I don’t have that husband any more.” The couple never divorced, but parted ways in the early 1970s.
Ms. Michaels met Ms. Anderson, another suburban mother, while working part time in market research. They chose their pen name because Ms. Michaels liked the name Michael in general, and had a huge plastic fern in her living room, as recounted in a 1978 interview with The New York Times.
The duo worked odd jobs, including cleaning clogged drains and taking door-to-door surveys, before publishing the first Fern Michaels novel, “Pride & Passion,” in 1975. The book recounts the tale of a woman who finds passion and danger in taking over her father’s rubber plantation in the Amazon.
Two years later, they achieved a commercial breakout with “Captive Passions,” a fiery tale set in 17th-century Java about a Spanish woman who embarks on a quest for revenge after her sister is ravaged and murdered by pirates.
After Ms. Michaels took over the pen name, she continued her relentless pace for decades. Even into her 90s, she typically published four books a year.
With success came rewards. In 1993, Ms. Michaels moved into a rambling antebellum plantation house in South Carolina, surrounded by Angel Oak trees dripping with Spanish moss and, she asserted on her website, a friendly ghost named Mary Margaret.
Like the author herself, Ms. Michaels’s characters often rose from humble beginnings to attain wealth and prominence.
The four-installment Texas series, which started with “Texas Rich” (1985), is about a young Philadelphia woman swept away by a wealthy Texas Navy pilot to a 250,000-acre spread near Austin, where she becomes an esteemed member of the Lone Star State gentry.
The book, which the partners considered their first mainstream novel, rode high on The Times’s list of paperback best sellers.
“When the papers and magazines continue to treat our million-dollar sales as a lucky break,” Ms. Michaels said in an interview that year with The Times, “they did both Roberta and me a disservice. We’re not any more, if we ever were, just two happy housewives from the New Jersey sticks who turn them out by the bale.”
The three-part Vegas series, starting with “Vegas Rich” (1996), concerns a resourceful but unpolished woman who abandons her Texas roots to follow her dreams among the roulette tables and neon and eventually becomes a powerful businesswoman considered the first lady of Las Vegas.
“Fern’s books became a safe place for women to find someone who not only understood what they were going through, but also celebrated them,” Esi Sogah, who edited several of Michaels’s books at Kensington Publishing, her publisher for most of the past three decades, wrote in an email. “She gave us a window into the world the way it could be, and showed us how to have a fun time doing it.”
Mary Ruth Koval was born on April 9, 1933, in Hastings, Pa., a small town about 85 miles east of Pittsburgh. Growing up an actual coal miner’s daughter during the Great Depression, she often would subsist on meals like onions and butter on white bread, her daughter said in an interview.
Over the years, she became a voracious reader, plowing through series like the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Cherry Ames. “The library was a magical place for me,” she later recalled.
After graduating from high school, she married Michael Kuczkir, a mechanical engineer in the aluminum industry, in 1952 and settled in Edison, N.J.
Once she took up writing, “my original intention was to write perhaps two, possibly three books about women who took matters into their own hands and righted some of the wrongs of the world,” she told Publishers Weekly. “That changed real quick with the phenomenal amount of mail I got after the first book.”
Tough-minded and sassy, with a taste for cigarettes and a famous obsession with dogs, she continued her furious pace until the end. She recently embarked on a new series, Twin Lights, about two siblings who inherit a marina on the Jersey Shore, and published the first installment, “Smuggler’s Cove,” in August. “Code Blue,” the 37th Sisterhood installment, will be published this month, and she has several books scheduled for publication in the coming year.
Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
Despite her outsize commercial success, she never claimed to be a belle-lettrist. “Is Fern Michaels a great writer,” she wrote on her site. “No. She is however, one hell of a story teller. When people ask me what I do, I say, ‘I scribble and tell stories.’ It’s a great way to make a living.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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