Belva Plain, who became a best-selling author at age 59 and whose multigenerational family sagas of Jewish American life won a loyal readership in the millions, died on Tuesday at her home in Short Hills, N.J. She was 95. Her daughter Barbara Plain confirmed her death.

59? There's hope for us yet.

Ms. Plain’s first novel, “Evergreen,” published in 1978, spent 41 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and another 20 in paperback, and was made into a mini-series by NBC in 1985. It follows Anna, a feisty, redheaded Jewish immigrant girl from Poland in turn-of-the-century New York, whose family story continues through several decades and three more books.

Strong-willed women, many of them Jewish and red-haired as well, appear again and again in Ms. Plain’s fiction. Some of her novels use historical settings — “Crescent City,” published in 1984, was set in the Jewish community of Civil War-era New Orleans. Other books tell stories about contemporary issues, sometimes inspired by the headlines — divorce (“Promises”), adoption (“Blessings”), child sexual abuse (“The Carousel”) or babies accidentally switched at birth (“Daybreak”). All of them are full of passion, but there is very little explicit sex. According to her publisher, almost 30 million copies of her books are in print, and they have been translated into 22 languages. Twenty of the novels have appeared on The New York Times best-seller list. The critics were often unimpressed by Ms. Plain’s novels. In a review of “Harvest” in The Times in 1990, Webster Schott described Ms. Plain’s works as “easy, consoling works of generous spirit, fat with plot and sentiment, thin in nearly every other way and almost invisible in character development.”

There's the age-old conflict between what critics call 'good' and what the public calls 'good.' What matters, in the market, anyway, is the latter, for critics only interest a small audience, and that won't pay the rent.

Such opinions did not stop millions from enjoying her books; readers’ comments on Amazon often speak of them as “big, cozy reads.” That would have pleased Ms. Plain, who saw nothing wrong with being entertaining. “Even the real geniuses, like Dostoyevsky, entertained,” she said.

Another point critics forget: Poe was thrashed by contemporaries, and now look at who's considered a genius.

Belva Plain’s own story sounds like something out of a novel. When “Evergreen” became an overnight success, she was a grandmother approaching 60. But she was not a novice; Ms. Plain had been writing for much of her life. Born Belva Offenberg in New York City on Oct. 9, 1915, she was a third-generation American of German Jewish descent; her father was a builder. She attended the Fieldston School and graduated from Barnard College in 1939 with a degree in history. She sold her first story to Cosmopolitan (“a very different magazine then,” she told an interviewer) when she was 25 and contributed several dozen to various women’s magazines until she had three children in rapid succession. (“I couldn’t have done both,” she explained.) She married Dr. Irving Plain, an ophthalmologist, in 1941; he died in 1982. In addition to her daughter Barbara, Ms. Plain is survived by another daughter, Nancy Goldfeder; a son, John; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.


Well groomed and conservatively dressed, she looked far younger than her age. “Ladylike” was an adjective often applied both to Ms. Plain and her books. (“Oh,” she once responded to an interviewer who had used it, “I certainly hope you don’t mean ‘prissy.’ ”) For her own reading, Ms. Plain preferred the classics and spoke of rereading the novels of Anthony Trollope. Many modern novels, she thought, were “sleazy trash.”

Ms. Plain’s work routine involved making detailed outlines of her books and then writing them in longhand in spiral notebooks, rarely using a typewriter and never a computer. A disciplined worker, she wrote for several hours in the morning five days a week. She produced a 500- or 600-page novel every year or so. Ms. Plain was fiercely private about her life, but she spoke about her novels, often to Jewish groups. “I got sick of reading the same old story, told by Jewish writers, of the same old stereotypes — the possessive mothers, the worn-out fathers, all the rest of the neurotic rebellious unhappy self-hating tribe,” she said. “I wanted to write a different novel about Jews — and a truer one.”


October 17, 2010: Belva Plain, Novelist of Jewish-American Life, Dies at 95. By ELSA DIXLER