L.J. Smith, an author of young adult novels best known for “The Vampire Diaries” series, which became a hit television drama, and for repossessing her characters by writing fan fiction after she was fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 66.
Her partner, Julie Divola, and her sister, Judy Clifford, said Ms. Smith died in a hospital after enduring the cascading effects of a rare autoimmune disease for a decade. She lived in nearby Danville, Calif.
The Wall Street Journal in 2014 wrote about Ms. Smith’s clever career reclamation, calling it “one of the strangest comebacks in literary history.”
Ms. Smith produced more than two dozen published books, with three more unpublished works completed before her death. Readers bought millions of copies of her work, beginning with the fantasy novel “The Night of the Solstice.” It was labeled for readers aged 8 to 12, and Ms. Smith started it in high school.
The book, published in 1987, sold only about 5,000 copies but intrigued an editor at Alloy Entertainment, a book packaging and production company that has since been acquired by Warner Brothers. Such companies devise ideas for books, find authors for them and then sell them to publishers.
At least in the publishing and entertainment world, vampires were thriving in the light of day. Anne Rice’s gothic “Interview With the Vampire” (1976) inspired a movie, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and later a short-lived television series.
Alloy Entertainment sought a young adult version of supernatural romance and signed Ms. Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries,” a series centered on a love triangle involving a popular high school girl named Elena Gilbert and a pair of vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore.
The first three books, written for HarperCollins, were published in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters.
She kept writing other young adult series until the late 1990s, when her career entered a tumultuous period. For almost a decade, she went dormant, developing writer’s block while tending to family trauma: Her then brother-in-law developed Stage 4 melanoma (he recovered), and her mother died of lung cancer.
“While I was immersed in this, I had no inspiration at all,” Ms. Smith said in a Q&A with readers on her website. “There were no stories in my head.”
During her fallow period, though, vampire books soared in popularity, lifted on the success of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.
In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used various musical genres to explored topics like romance and morality and helped popularize a grunge and leather-jacket fashion look.
By 2014, the “Vampire Diaries” book series had sold more than five million copies, but Ms. Smith was no longer writing the authorized version: Alloy Entertainment fired her in 2011 over what its president and founder, Leslie Morgenstein, told The Wall Street Journal were creative differences.
A ghostwriter and then an author using the pen name Aubrey Clark were brought in to complete the final six books in the series. Ms. Smith said in interviews that she had believed that Alloy and HarperCollins wanted shorter books more closely associated with the TV series. They continued to put Ms. Smith’s name prominently on the cover of the books as the series’ creator.
She told Salt Lake magazine in 2012 that her dismissal had helped to “mutilate” and ultimately destroy her creation “limb by limb.”
Mr. Morgenstein, did not respond to a request for comment.
Eventually, Ms. Smith found an outlet to reclaim her characters — fan fiction, which book lovers have long written and posted, spooling out their own amateur versions of stories and characters even though they did not own the intellectual property and it was often not strictly legal.
In 2013, Amazon created Kindle Worlds, an online service that gave writers of fan fiction permission to write about certain licensed properties, including Alloy’s “Vampire Diaries” series, and to earn money for their ventures.
In 2014, Ms. Smith became the rare celebrated author to produce fan fiction as a way to recoup characters and story arcs she had lost, publishing a novel and novella in an informal continuation of the “Vampire Diaries.” (Kindle Worlds was discontinued in 2018).
Her partner, Ms. Divola, a San Francisco tax lawyer, said Ms. Smith had turned to fan fiction after being left “very hurt and indignant” at being replaced by a ghostwriter.
“When you’re a writer, you feel like your characters and your worlds, those are yours,” Ms. Divola said in an interview. “You’ve given birth to them; they’re like your children. I would put it akin to a custody battle.”
Lisa Jane Smith was born on Sept. 4, 1958, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Her family soon moved to Southern California. She grew up in Villa Park, where her interest in magic, fantasy and the supernatural blossomed amid the neighboring orange groves.
Her father, Glenn C. Smith, had been a star end on the Clemson University football team. He became an engineer and was a partner in a company that made metal connector plates for floor and roof trusses. He died in 2017. Her mother, Kathryn (Check) Smith, who died in 2007, was a flight attendant for Pan American Airways and a teacher before raising Lisa and her younger sister, Judy.
In addition to her sister, Ms. Clifford, and Ms. Divola, Ms. Smith is survived by a niece, a nephew and a grand nephew.
Ms. Smith often said she was inspired to become a writer as a child in kindergarten or first grade, when a teacher “praised a horrible poem I’d written.”
Her imagination was stoked by many things, her sister said, including tall tales their father told of keeping a tiger in the trunk of his car and of being a Martian stuck on earth. Once, while babysitting at a house with oddly-shaped mirrors, Ms. Smith got the notion that they might be portals to a parallel world.
When her sister was teased in middle school, Ms. Smith comforted her with humorous stories about how her antagonists would get their due, displaying empathy and a sense of justice that would become a hallmark of her writing about strong female characters.
Ms. Smith received a Bachelor of Arts degree in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982 and taught kindergarten and special education for several years before becoming a full-time writer. She went by L.J. Smith in her writing to sound more authorial and to honor two of her favorite novelists, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
In addition to “The Vampire Diaries,” Ms. Smith wrote three other popular series for young adults: “Night World,” “Dark Visions” and “The Secret Circle,” which also became a series on the CW, lasting one season.
An indefatigable writer, Ms. Smith took her laptop with her as she went in and out of hospitals over the past decade. Her agent during that time, John Silbersack, said that before she died Ms. Smith had completed two books to conclude the “Night World” series and an adult novel, “Lullaby,” about a postapocalyptic world.
“She had been quite ill, but despite the difficulties and the pain, she was fiercely dedicated to continuing to write,” Mr. Silbersack said. “She wanted to get it right, to be quite perfect.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/books/lj-smith-dead.html
