The Best of Everything Synopsis
Rona Jaffe's beloved novel about 1950s NYC women in the workplace that paved the way for the #MeToo movement and iconic cultural touchstones like Sex and the City and Mad Men, now for the first time in Penguin Classics, in a 65th anniversary edition with an introduction by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme
A Penguin Classic
When Rona Jaffe's superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Sixty-five years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly-and sometimes hilariously-true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There's Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor's office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.
About This Edition
Rona Jaffe Press Reviews
This stirring, evocative novel tells it exactly as it was - Fay Weldon
Not since One Day have I stayed up so late reading a book, but Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything has me gripped...So much more than chick-lit -- Laura Craik - The Evening Standard
The emotional lives of these women are beautifully drawn...It is, I think, the perfect summer read: juicy, involving and classy. Even as you smile at the thought that smoking was once considered a skill, and white cotton gloves a wardrobe basic, it will also make you feel nostalgic for your own past, for those feverish days when fear and elation were pretty much the same thing -- Rachel Cooke - The Observer
One of Don's first bed companions in series one of Mad Men is not another woman, but The Best of Everything, this 1958 novel by Rona Jaffe...It is a world of typing pools and tie-wearing at all times; of whiskey drinking and womanising; a world in which secretaries grope their way towards feminism with difficulty and bosses grope their secretaries with with ease...As Draper himself might say: fascinating - The Times
Decades before Sex and the City, Jaffe recorded the minutiae of women's lives and broke powerful taboos. -- Joan Smith - The Independent
I absolutely LOVED this ...what a great novel -- Elizabeth Noble Most career girls, past or present, will respond with the shock of authenticity - The Saturday Review
The book is a fantastically entertaining and witty read, following the lives of three young women, Caroline, Gregg, and April working on the New York publishing scene as they search for love while trying to succeed in the metropolis ... the book's portrait of young women at a vibrant stage in their life, their excitement, fun, struggles and friendships in the city, is accurate and timeless. A fabulous summer novel best consumed poolside with a cigarette and martini -- Lucy Greene - City A.M.
