An American journalist, Ellen Holtz Goodman (born 1941) won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She wrote about issues that spanned the range from personal to political.

Ellen Goodman was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on April 11, 1941, the daughter of a Boston lawyer/politician of some social standing, Jackson Jacob Holtz, and Edith Weinstein Holtz. Her father died in 1966, when she was 25 years old. He twice had been a Democratic candidate for Congress from Brookline, an affluent suburb, in the Eisenhower years (the 1950s). In her youth Ellen lived a conventional upper-middle-class life. She later wrote in the introduction to one of her books, Turning Points (1979), that she wanted everything to stay the same: "I wanted to live in the same house, go to the same school, keep the same friends... forever."

Goodman attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1963 with a degree in modern European history (cum laude), and married Anthony Goodman...