The Best of Everything

The Best of Everything is the first novel by the American writer Rona Jaffe, published in 1958.

The book follows five young women who work for a New York publishing company. Caroline, who went to an Ivy League college, is trying to get out of the typing pool and into an editor's office; April comes from the country and within months has turned herself into the woman every man wants to be seen with; Gregg is an actress with a secret wish for an ordinary married life. Their jobs, their shared flats and the men who pass through them are followed across the months that change the shape of each life.

The novel was bought for the screen before its manuscript had been edited and was filmed in 1959, and it became an ABC soap opera in 1970 with a stage adaptation following much later. Its headings list women editors, publishers, stenographers, female friendship, young women and the fiction of the 1950s.