Writer and former publishing executive who co-founded Common Sense Media, Liz Perle died on Thursday at her home in San Francisco. She was 59, reports New York Times. Liz died due to breast cancer.

Perle began her career in 1981 as the associate marketing director at Times Books. She eventually donned the role of associate publisher for hardcover and paperback publishing at Bantam, where among other accomplishments she created the marketing plan for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and acquired and edited non-fiction works as Free to Be…A Family by Marlo Thomas.

In 1988, at the age of 32, Perle was named VP and publisher at Prentice Hall Press, a division of Simon & Schuster and In 1991, Perle became VP and publisher at Addison-Wesley Publishers. She closed out her New York publishing career as VP and publisher at William Morrow and Avon Books.

Perle was the author of When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity (Delacorte Press, 1997) and Money: A Memoir (Henry Holt, 2006).