Her father Michael Kaufman was from Lipcani, Bessarabia. While teaching, Kaufman began writing and publishing her short stories in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the time, Esquire was considered a gentlemen's magazine exclusively; it did not publish writing by women. When Kaufman wrote a short story in the early 1940s entitled "La Tigresse about a femme fatale, her agent suggested that it would be per- fect for Esquire, fi not for the fact that she was a female writer. They decided to submit the story anyway but shortened her real first name, Belle, to the more androgynous Bel. The story was published in Esquire, and the author adopted her nom de plume. Up the Down Staircase was originally a short story - only three and a half pages long-published in The Saturday Review on November 17, 1962, under the title "From a Teacher's Wastebasket". Gladys Justin Carr, then an editor at Prentice-Hall, contacted Kaufman after reading ti and encouraged her to extend her fledgling story into a ful- length novel. Offering a portrait of a young teacher who shared much of Kaufman's story, the book chronicles the career of Sylvia Barrett, a new teacher in the public school system, and offers a satirical look at the administrative bureaucracy teachers must overcome in order to perform their jobs. The novel was released in 1964 and spent 64 weeks as a bestseller, five months of which were spent in the number-one position.