Edith Ann Grossman was born on June 26, 1936, in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. She studied English literature at Radcliffe College and graduated in 1957. After college she became a computer programmer and married Chester Pearlman in 1967. She published more than 200 short stories. Some of her early collections included, Vaquita (1996), Love Among the Greats (2002), and How to Fall (2005). Her last book was Honeydew (2014). She is best known for her collection of short stories, Binocular Vision, published in 2011. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story. Edith Pearlman died at the age of eighty-six on January 1, 2023, in Brookline, Massachusetts.