Susan Beth Pfeffer, whose novels for young adult readers delved into sensitive subjects like suicide, sexual harassment and the sheer complexity of growing up in a modern American family, and who found late-career success with a best-selling series set in postapocalyptic Pennsylvania, died on Monday at her home in Monroe, N.Y. She was 77.
Her brother, Alan Pfeffer, said the cause was endometrial cancer.
Ms. Pfeffer was astoundingly prolific, publishing 76 novels in a career of more than 40 years. The first, “Just Morgan,” appeared in 1970, a year after she graduated from New York University; the last, “The Shade of the Moon,” was published in 2013.
She wrote across a wide variety of genres, including historical fiction and science fiction dystopias, but certain themes ran through all her works — above all, how families operate, or don’t, in the face of challenges, whether quotidian or catastrophic.
She was unafraid to tackle difficult topics: In “The Year Without Michael” (1987), family and friends try to deal with the disappearance of the title character, who at the book’s end has still not returned.
Another book, “About David” (1980), follows the diary entries of a teenage girl, Lynn, whose friend and neighbor, David, kills his parents and then himself.
In 1987, a school board in Florida banned “About David,” alongside “I Am the Cheese” (1977), Robert Cormier’s novel about a teenager whose family is in the witness protection program.
Ms. Pfeffer considered retiring from writing multiple times before hitting it big with “Life as We Knew It” (2006), the story of a family in rural Pennsylvania trying to survive after an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth, wreaking havoc on the weather, sea levels and volcanic activity.
“Life as We Knew It” appeared just before a flurry of similarly grim postapocalyptic novels aimed at young readers, including the “Hunger Games” and “Maze Runner” series. It reached the Times best-seller list in paperback.
Another book, “The Dead and the Gone,” set in the same literary universe — Ms. Pfeffer insisted it was not a sequel — was published in 2008, followed by two more entries in the series: “This World We Live In” (2010) and “The Shade of the Moon,” her last book.
The novelist John Green, writing about “The Dead and the Gone” for The Times Book Review in 2008, called it “dark and scary,” adding that Ms. Pfeffer “subtly explores the complexity of believing in an omnipotent God in the wake of an event that, if it could have been prevented, surely would have been.”
Susan Beth Pfeffer was born on Feb. 17, 1948, in Manhattan, the daughter of Leo Pfeffer, a lawyer, and Freda (Plotkin) Pfeffer, a secretary. She grew up in Queens and suburban Nassau County.
She knew from an early age that she wanted to be an author — she wrote her first novel, “Dookie the Cookie,” when she was in third grade. And while it didn’t get published, she kept scribbling through high school and college.
She studied film at N.Y.U. and briefly considered it as a career, inspired in part by a teaching assistant in one of her classes, an as-yet-unknown Martin Scorsese. But she found the technical side of filmmaking frustrating and returned to fiction.
During her senior year, one professor, the historian of publishing John Tebbel, asked his class to write a short story. She ended up writing an entire novel, “Just Morgan,” which she sold to a publisher before graduating in 1969.
The book received good reviews, but it took Ms. Pfeffer two years and multiple rejections before she published her next, “Better Than All Right,” in 1972.
From then on, Ms. Pfeffer wrote quickly, sometimes two or more books a year. She told interviewers that she rarely wasted time on finding the perfect word or crafting a detailed character description; like the former film student she was, her focus was pacing and dialogue.
Many of her protagonists are teenage girls. Her novel “The Ring of Truth,” published in 1993, was about the scandal that ensues after a politician makes a pass at an underage intern.
In 1997, she published four books in her “Portraits of Little Women” series, each of them exploring the life of one of the main characters in Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women.” The next year, she wrote four more books about the same characters.
Ms. Pfeffer’s brother is her only immediate survivor.
Though she did not score a best seller until “Life as We Knew It,” Ms. Pfeffer developed a reliable core of readers, who followed her through her wide-ranging genre journeys.
Even her books with darker themes, she said, elicited positive responses from readers.
“The letters I get from kids pretty uniformly say the positive they get out of the books is to appreciate their lives and the people they love,” she told Publishers Weekly in 2010. “What I’m getting from the kids is, ‘I never thought to appreciate all the everyday things I took for granted.’”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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