Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended the Dalton School and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 at the age of nineteen. In her early twenties, she worked at Fawcett Publications, starting as a file clerk and working her way up to associate editor. At twenty-five, she quit her job to focus on her novel The Best of Everything (1958). She went on to write sixteen more books during her career including Mr. Right Is Dead (1965), The Other Woman (1972), Family Secrets (1974), Class Reunion (1979), The Road Taken (2000), and The Room-Mating Season (2001). In 1995, she established The Rona Jaffe Foundation, supporting promising emergent women writers. Jaffe died of cancer in 2005.