Norma Klein was born May 13, 1938, in New York City and lived there until her death on April 25, 1989.

Klein's father, Emanuel Klein, was a Freudian psychoanalyst; her mother, Sadie Frankel Klein, was an accomplished tennis player; and her one younger brother, Victor, became a social worker. The author described her parents as "nonreligious Jews, politically left-wing, intellectual."

From age three to thirteen, Klein attended the Dalton School in New York and graduated from Elizabeth Irwin High School in 1956. She went to Cornell University for one year, then to Barnard College where she received her B.A. in Russian in 1960, achieving cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa distinctions. She earned her master's degree in Slavic languages from Columbia University in 1963. She stated that she studied Russian because of her love for the short stories of Anton Chekhov, adding that if she were on a deserted island...