Rona Jaffe (June 12, 1931 – December 30, 2005)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Rona Jaffe (June 12, 1931, Brooklyn, New York – December 30, 2005, London, UK) was an American novelist.

Born in Brooklyn, Ms. 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 maternal grandfather was Moses Ginsberg, a millionaire construction magnate who built the Carlyle Hotel.

Jaffe wrote her first book, The Best of Everything, while working as an associate editor at Fawcett Publications in the 1950s. Published in 1958, it was later made into a movie, starring Joan Crawford. The book has been described as distinctly "pre-women's liberation" in the way it depicts women in the working world. Critic Camille Paglia noted in 2004 that the book and popular HBO series Sex and the City had much in common with Jaffe's novel in that the characters, who have similar lifestyles, are both "very much at the mercy of cads."

During the 1960s, in addition to writing more novels, she was hired by Helen Gurley Brown to write cultural pieces for Cosmopolitan with a "Sex and the Single Girl" slant.

In 1981 she published her controversial novel Mazes and Monsters, which depicted a Dungeons & Dragons-style game that caused disorientation and hallucinations among its players and incited them to violence and attempted suicide. The book was in part based on the largely apocryphal 1979 steam tunnel incident and dovetailed with Patricia Pulling's accusations in the 1980s that D&D and other role-playing games encouraged devil worship and other evils. The book was made into a television movie starring the young Tom Hanks.

Jaffe subsequently published six additional novels during her career.

She founded The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents annual awards to promising women writers of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is the only national literary awards program dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively.

Ms. Jaffe was a lifelong New Yorker. She died in 2005 in London, while in vacation, from cancer, aged 74.

First Book - The Best of Everything (1958): The Best of Everything

Last Book - The Room-Mating Season (2003): The Room-Mating Season

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rona_Jaffe

http://www.ronajaffe.com/about.htm

Comments

Best of Everything

[(Anonymous)]

Good article. I read the book decades ago and liked in a way. But it was too dated for me, though I adored the clothes they wore in the movie version, which I watched late at night on PBS repeats. I adored secretaries in the 50s and wish I could be one too. That reminds me, also a good book from the 60s is 'Boys and Girls Together'. Has the same theme, making it in the City, until one character who is gay, meets up with another gay rich boy who turns him off from being openly gay. I think the publisher stepped in and put his fist down, "No positive gay writing here!" Anyway was a best seller in the 60s.

Mick

www.mykoladementiuk.com

Re: Best of Everything

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

But anyway the story seems good, and the rich boy, other than putting in the closet the "secretary", did at least had a story with him? Elisa