Liz Perle, a writer and former publishing executive who co-founded Common Sense Media <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/>, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping families navigate the complex worlds of entertainment, media and technology, died on Thursday at her home in San Francisco. She was 59.
The cause was breast cancer, her husband, Steven Pressman, said.
Ms. Perle (pronounced Pearly) had worked in publishing and written a memoir about women's finances when she and Jim Steyer, a lawyer and children's advocate, formed Common Sense Media in San Francisco in 2002. She became its editor in chief.
Common Sense provides reviews and curriculums to help parents and teachers find appropriate content, and it shows children how to engage with the digital world responsibly.
"One of the things we do at Common Sense is teach our kids to see because we can't cover their eyes," Ms. Perle said on the NPR news program "All Things Considered" in 2009.
Ms. Perle held executive posts at Times Books, Bantam Books, Prentice Hall and Addison-Wesley in New York, but she gave up the work in the 1990s to move with her first husband, Steven McKenna, to Singapore, where he had been hired for a job.
Their marriage ended soon afterward, and Ms. Perle moved to San Francisco in 1998.
"A surprise divorce landed me on a friend's couch with a 4-year-old and a few hundred bucks, and a wake-up call," Ms. Perle told the television journalist Maria Bartiromo on CNBC in 2006.
The episode inspired her to write "Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash" (2006), an autobiographical book that delved into what Ms. Perle saw as women's reluctance to deal with their finances. A review in Publishers Weekly called it "a fascinating, anxiety-inducing, ultimately eye-opening book that defies categorization."
Ms. Perle eventually got a job as an editor at large for HarperSanFrancisco, where she worked with the actor Sidney Poitier and the primatologist Jane Goodall. She and Mr. Steyer started Common Sense Media a few years later.
Elizabeth Ann Perle was born April 13, 1956, in Manhattan and lived in Rowayton, Conn., until she was 8, when her mother, Ellen Kraus Perle, died of breast cancer. She then moved to Manhattan with her father, E. Gabriel Perle.
Ms. Perle attended Riverdale Country School in the Bronx before entering Hampshire College. Transferring to Yale, she got her bachelor's degree in 1977.
In her publishing career, she devised Bantam's marketing plan for Stephen Hawking's best seller "A Brief History of Time," Publishers Weekly said. She became vice president and publisher of Prentice Hall Press in 1988.
Ms. Perle also wrote "When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity," published in 1997.
In 2013 she appeared in the HBO documentary "50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus," <http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/50-children-the-rescue-mission-of-mr-and-mrs-kraus> which was directed by Mr. Pressman and told the story of her grandparents, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1D61E3DF934A35757C0A9659D8B63>, who had helped 50 Jewish children escape Nazi Germany <http://www.50childrenfilm.com/The_Film.html> in 1939.
Ms. Perle married Mr. Pressman in 2001. She is also survived by a son, David Perle McKenna, and a stepdaughter, Roshann Pressman.