Judith Krantz Books in Order

For the full Judith Krantz experience: Scruples → Princess Daisy → Mistral's Daughter
If you want Beverly Hills glamour and continuing characters: Scruples → Scruples Two → Lovers
If you prefer big family sagas: Princess Daisy → Till We Meet Again
If fashion and creative worlds are the draw: Mistral's Daughter → Dazzle → Spring Collection
If you want Judith Krantz in her own voice: Sex and Shopping

Judith Krantz was born Judith Tarcher in Manhattan on January 9, 1928, and grew up on Central Park West in a wealthy, emotionally distant family. She finished Birch Wathen young, then went to Wellesley College, where she read hard, dated widely, and started building the taste for glamour, observation, and social detail that would later make its way into her fiction. She later wrote that she had not been an especially happy child, which helps explain why fantasy, beauty, and self-invention became such strong currents in her work.

Paris mattered.

After graduating from Wellesley in 1948, she spent a year in Paris working in fashion public relations. That year gave her a sharper eye for clothes, surfaces, and the way money changes a room. It also gave her romance, disappointment, and a firsthand sense of how style can be a kind of social language. Back in New York she joined Good Housekeeping, first in the fiction department and then in fashion and accessories, before writing for magazines like McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan.

She married television producer Steve Krantz in 1954. They had two sons, Nicholas and Tony, and over time lived in New York, Canada, France, and eventually Los Angeles. Her magazine work ranged from fashion coverage to celebrity profiles and frank, much talked about pieces on sex. Even so, she thought of herself as a journalist, not a novelist, the person with notebooks, deadlines, and reported pieces, not someone who made up entire worlds.

Then she became a novelist almost absurdly late.

Krantz was around 50 when she finally tried fiction in earnest. Part of the push came when her sons left for college, and part came from facing another fear, learning to fly in a small plane. She had once backed away from fiction after getting a B in a Wellesley creative writing class, so starting late had a private sting to it. Once she sat down at her Smith Corona typewriter, Scruples came fast. Published in 1978, it became a huge bestseller and turned her into one of the defining writers of glossy popular fiction. Several of her novels later became television miniseries, which suited their scale and shine.

The books that followed kept widening that world. Princess Daisy brought aristocracy, scandal, and a battered fairy-tale glamour. Mistral's Daughter moved through art, fashion, and generations of women shaped by one magnetic painter. I'll Take Manhattan took her into magazine publishing, a setting she knew from the inside, while Till We Meet Again stretched across decades, countries, and war. Dazzle returned to California with a heroine at the center of celebrity photography. Readers came for the escape, but they also stayed for the women at the center, who were ambitious, practical, vain, wounded, funny, and usually much better at work than the men around them.

Krantz never pretended she was writing solemn literature. She was open that her books were entertainment, and that honesty became part of her appeal. She did the research, loved the details, and understood that a dress, a ring, or a room could do real character work. She understood aspiration as deeply as she understood insecurity. Again and again, she wrote about reinvention, money, female desire, and the way glamour can be both a costume and a tool.

In her later years she stayed in Los Angeles, kept close to fashion, and finished her run of novels with The Jewels of Tessa Kent. In 2000 she published the memoir Sex and Shopping, which pulled the curtain back on her childhood, marriage, writing life, and the real experiences that fed her fiction. Steve Krantz died in 2007. Judith Krantz died at her Bel Air home on June 22, 2019, at 91, leaving behind books that still know exactly how to deliver old-school escape.