Parents of Kaavya Viswanathan, Class of 2006, were killed last Sunday when their airplane crashed into a cornfield in Columbus, Ohio. (Source: The New York Times)

Viswanathan, a member of Georgetown Law School Class of 2011, was (in)famous for her book deal gone awry with publishing house Little Brown and Co. in 2006. She was paid a reported $500,000 advance to write two young adult fiction books as a freshman, the first of which was published in March of 2006 under the title “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.”

The book, which reflected on the college admission process through the eyes of an Ivy League-obsessed Indian American teenager, received rave reviews and quickly ascended the New York Times bestseller list, only to face a litany of plagiarism accusations about a month later, mostly from the author of the bestselling Jessica Darling series, Megan McCafferty. While Viswanathan insisted that any imitation and borrowing from other books was unconscious and unintentional, her contract soon went up in flames and so did the remaining of her unsold novels.

The plane crash occurred en route from Ohio to New Jersey, where the Viswanathans have been living in the past 12 years. It killed both passengers on board – her neurosurgeon father and obstetrician mother.

We offer our sincerest condolences to Viswanathan for her loss.