The Best of Everything
About this audiobook
This gossipy and glamorous novel of young women starting out in publishing was a 1950s New York Times bestseller and the basis for the Joan Crawford movie.
"Both a scandal and a roaring success." — The Washington Post
Twenty-year-old Caroline Bender lives with her parents in Port Blair, New York. But now she's commuting into Manhattan for her first post-college job, along with thousands of other women looking to find their true calling—or the perfect husband.
The midtown offices of Fabian Publications teem with typists and secretaries from around the country, all looking to make their mark. After a devastating breakup, Caroline needs something to take her mind off of her former fiancé. Fresh from small-town Colorado, April Morrison transforms herself into a sophisticated city girl but still harbors naïve dreams of the perfect man. Already divorced at nineteen, Barbara Lemont struggles to make ends meet while supporting her daughter and mother. And temp Gregg Adams, searching for stardom on the stage, falls into a toxic relationship with a Broadway producer.
As the seasons pass, Caroline and her friends navigate cutthroat office politics, lecherous married men, unplanned pregnancies, and broken hearts—all in a coming-of-age journey that will prove just how far they're willing to go for love and success.
"Lively, delightful and heartbreaking . . . The Best of Everything seized the mood of the moment and told the truth, and women by the millions devoured it. Sixty-five years later, I did, too." — The Minnesota Star Tribune
"Jaffe's classic still strikes a chord, this time eerily prescient regarding so many of the circumstances surrounding sexual harassment that paved the way toward the #MeToo movement." — BuzzFeed
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About the author
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.
