Joyce Elbert was born in the Bronx on February 26, 1930, the only child of Melba and Charles Krimmer, an Austrian immigrant whose once-thriving dress manufacturing company went bankrupt during the Great Depression. She attended New York City's Christopher Columbus High School and Hunter College, from which she received a bachelor of arts degree in Journalism in 1952. In 1958, Elbert was one of the founding editors of the Provincetown Review, a literary magazine for which author Norman Mailer served as advisor. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Getting Rid of Richard, was completed in 1959 although it didn't see publication until 1972. Her 1969 novel, The Crazy Ladies, was dubbed "the first really great dirty book" by Cosmopolitan. In 1980, more than 5,000,000 copies of her books were in print worldwide, including translations into Spanish, French, German, and Croatian. Elbert's last published novel, The Return of the Crazy Ladies, was released in 1984. She died on May 8, 2009, in Volusia, Florida, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), leaving behind at least seven unpublished novels, as well as several short stories and autobiographical essays.