Rona Jaffe

Rona Jaffe (June 12, 1931 – December 30, 2005) was an American novelist, who published numerous works from 1958–2003. She may have been best known for her controversial novel, Mazes and Monsters (1981). During the 1960s, she also wrote cultural pieces for Cosmopolitan as the new editor, Helen Gurley Brown, markedly changed its character.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Jaffe grew up in affluent circumstances on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the only child of Samuel Jaffe, an elementary-school principal, and his first wife, Diana (née Ginsberg). Her grandfather was a construction magnate who built the Carlyle Hotel. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1953.

Jaffe wrote her first book, The Best of Everything (1958), while working as an associate editor at Fawcett Publications in the 1950s. It was later adapted as a movie by the same title, starring Joan Crawford, released in 1959. The book has been described as distinctly "pre-women's liberation" in the way it depicts women in the working world. Michael Korda described it as the "very prototype of the hot 'women's novel' that would eventually reach its climax with Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. Jaffe talked about the book and her motivation for writing it during an interview with Hugh Hefner, in the first episode of his Playboy's Penthouse television show in 1959.