She wrote her first and most famous book while working as an associate editor at Fawcett Publishing in the 1950s. Published in 1958, and made into a movie starring Joan Crawford a year later, The Best of Everything is a novel about three career women who work in the typing pool of a big New York publishing company. The book has been described as distinctly "pre-women's liberation" in the way it depicts women in the working world. Though the characters have jobs, it's men and marriage that interest them more than their careers. Critic Camille Paglia noted in 2004 that the book and popular HBO series Sex and the City has 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 '60s, 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 her novel Mazes and Monsters became a TV movie starring Tom Hanks.

Books by Rona Jaffe