Jackie Collins, who wrote the kind of novels that tweedy English professors typically ignore or sniff at — sex-filled, escapist, utterly unpretentious — but that millions of readers devour and teenagers used to read by flashlight under the covers at night, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 77.

The cause was breast cancer, her family said in a statement on the author’s website.

“Jackie Collins is one of the world’s top-selling novelists,” the website says, boasting that her 30 or so books have sold more than 500 million copies in 40 countries while giving readers “an unrivaled insider’s knowledge of Hollywood and the glamorous lives (and loves) of the rich, famous, and infamous!”

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2011, Ms. Collins herself said: “Sex is a driving force in the world, so I don’t think it’s unusual that I write about sex. I try to make it erotic, too.”

Indeed, her first novel, “The World Is Full of Married Men,” was so steamy that for a time it was banned in Australia and South Africa after its publication in 1968. Ms. Collins gleefully recounted in a magazine interview a confrontation with the romance writer Barbara Cartland, who called the book “filthy and disgusting” and blamed her “for all the perverts in England.”