Rona Jaffe

Rona Jaffe
Born (1931-06-12)June 12, 1931
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Died December 30, 2005(2005-12-30) (aged 74)
London, England, U.K.
Occupation Novelist

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.[1]

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.[1] 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.[2]

Camille Paglia noted in 2004 that the book and popular HBO series Sex and the City had much in common in that the characters in both (who have similar lives) are "very much at the mercy of cads."[3]

During the late 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown hired Jaffe to write cultural pieces for Cosmopolitan, with a "Sex and the Single Girl" slant. In 1981, she published Mazes and Monsters, which depicted a Dungeons & Dragons-like game that caused disorientation and hallucinations among its players and incited them to violence and attempted suicide. The book was controversial as it appeared to be based in part on the apocryphal 1979 steam tunnel incident. Soon it seemed related to Patricia Pulling's accusations in the 1980s that D&D and other role-playing games encouraged devil worship and other "evils". The book was adapted as a 1982 made-for-TV movie starring a Tom Hanks.

Death

Jaffe published seventeen novels during her career. She died in 2005 in London from cancer, aged 74.[1]

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 3 Owens, Mitchell (December 31, 2005). "Rona Jaffe, Author of Popular Novels, Is Dead at 74". The New York Times. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
  2. ↑ Playboy's Penthouse details, imdb.com; accessed September 23, 2015.
  3. ↑ Smith, Dinitia (February 1, 2004). "Real-Life Questions In an Upscale Fantasy". The New York Times. Retrieved July 15, 2014.

External links

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