Norma Klein was born on May 13, 1938, in New York City. She grew up on Manhattan Island and died on April 25, 1989, also in New York City, after a brief illness. She was the daughter of Emanuel Klein, a Freudian psychoanalyst, and Sadie Klein. Although as an adult she became disenchanted with Freudian psychoanalysis, her interest in using her fiction to help adolescents with problems surely stems in large part from her interaction with her father.

Klein attended Dalton School from ages three to thirteen. She attended Elizabeth Irwin School during her high school years. Both were, she said, progressive schools, run on the model of Summerhill in England.

She attended Cornell University from 1956 to 1957, and received her bachelor's degree, cum laude, in 1960, from Barnard College, where she majored in Russian and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. At Barnard, she took creative writing courses...