The Fame Game

Rona Jaffe was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1931. She was the daughter of Samuel Jaffe, a high school principal, & Diana (née Ginsberg) Jaffe, the daughter of Moses Ginsberg, the construction magnate who built the Carlyle Hotel. Rona was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan & was a lifelong New Yorker. She attended the Dalton School & graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 at the age of 19. In her early 20s she worked at Fawcett Publications, starting as a file clerk & working her way up to associate editor. At 25 she quit her job to focus on a novel she had started about women in the publishing industry. 

In 1958 The Best of Everything was published by Simon & Schuster. The work, provocative & prescient, hit a nerve among readers, especially women, & became an overnight success & bestseller. The following year a film adaptation was released starring Joan Crawford, Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, & Diane Baker. Jaffe went on to write 16 more books during her career, including the bestselling Class Reunion, Family Secrets, The Last Chance, & Mr. Right Is Dead. She is the founder of the Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents a national literary award to promising women writers.