HOLDEN CAULFIELD, in The Catcher in the Rye, has a lot to answer for. Certainly he was not the first American adolescent to commune with his readership about the weight of his woes, but his arrival in 1951 was to inspire a new generation of writers to the exploitation of tales told in a teenage demotic. The lucrative literary sub-genre of young adult fiction became fashionable, and prominent among its exponents, and with an eye fixed upon girl readers, was Paula Danziger.

Paula Danziger was born in Washington in 1944. Childhood experience was to give the future novelist’s writing a theme and a direction. Her upbringing was a highly disturbed one. She was later to describe her parents’ behaviour as dysfunctional, and at the age of 12 she was put on tranquillisers.

Through this and her later work as a junior-high-school teacher she gained a sympathetic understanding of the seemingly large troubles that may afflict small people, not least in the tensions of family life. (Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? was to be the title of one of her fictions.)

Admiration for, and friendship with, the poet John Ciardi led her to a belief that she might turn her talents to writing, and her first book, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit (1974), for which she claimed a measure of autobiographical truth, was dedicated to him. As a story which jams together a teenage girl’s personal dissatisfactions (low self-esteem, a wildly temperamental father) and the ousting from her school of a liberal-minded English teacher who will not give the pledge of allegiance (a daily event in US schools of that time) the book is a callow performance. But it was welcomed by its intended audience for its author’s clear preference for her teenage heroine over the “senior blimps” who seek to thwart her and for her casting the narrative in the girl’s own caustic tones: “School is a bummer. The only creative writing I could do was anonymous letters to the s tudent council suggestion box. Lunches are lousy. We never get past the First World War in history class. We never learned anything . . .”

Much of the rest of her fiction calls — often implausibly — on the teenager as narrator, but even in her second book, The Pistachio Prescription (1978) and in a sequel to the first, There’s a Bat in Bunk Five (1980), Danziger becomes more adept in handling her plots and their potential for a wry comedy. What appealed to her readers was the running commentary on characters and events and the slick dialogue, while the suburban homes, schools, shopping malls and campsites — and even the landmarks of New York in Remember Me to Harold Square (1987) — form only a backdrop.

Although Danziger is best known for her stories of teenage girls, she also, between 1989 and 1992, wrote a sequence of stories centred upon 11-year-old Matthew Martin, computer whizz and junk-food addict, where, as third-person narrator, she was able to introduce a greater flexibility into her storytelling, making liberal use of spoof reproductions of messages and letters.

In 1993 she went on to launch a well-regarded sequence of shorter tales for younger readers about the progress through the junior grades of Amber Brown — helpfully christened to allow appropriate jokes.

The American and the British editions of these little books were bountifully illustrated by the English artist Tony Ross, a token perhaps of Danziger’s liking for the UK. For although her books were slow to find publishers in England (it took twelve years for The Cat Ate My Gymsuit and its fellows to cross the Atlantic), they eventually found a ready readership, and Danziger — an enthusiastic proponent of books and libraries — participated for a while in a book slot on the BBC’s children’s programme Live and Kicking.

That title would have done well for Danziger herself who had a residence in London, commuting there from her homes in New York with “airplanes always good for a sleepover”. She will be well-remembered for her dashing character, her flamboyant dressing — amazing ear-rings and sequined slippers — and her love of jokes. “I might have been a stand-up comic,” she once said, “except that I ’ve got trick knees and I’m a morning person”.

She never married.

Paula Danziger, author, was born on May 18, 1944. She died after a heart attack on July 8, 2004, aged 60.